and thousands of others which meet us at every opening of the leaves.

Fancy, on the other hand, is generally (but not always) glittering and cold-the preparatory machinery of poetry, without its passion; sporting with sights which catch the eye only, and sounds which play but on the ear. It proceeds upon a principle of assimilation, and irradiates an idea with similes; but it leaves the original thought untouched, and merely surrounds it with things which ornament, without either hiding or changing it. Fancy seems like an after-thought, springing out of the original idea but the Imagination is born with it, coequal, inextricable, like the colour and the shape of a flower. Imagination, indeed, is as it were a condensation of the Fancy; acting directly on the idea, and investing it with qualities to which it is the business of Fancy to compare it. The loftiest instances of the last-mentioned faculty are perhaps in Milton, as, where he describes the populous North," when her "barbarous sons"

"Came-like a deluge on the South!"

or where he speaks of the archangel Satan, saying that

"He stood-like a tower!"

Here, although "the populous North" itself is imaginative, and the conception of Satan a grand fiction of the imagination, the likenesses ascribed to each are the work of Fancy. In both these cases, however, she soars almost beyond her region. Again, in the words of Lear,

"Thou think'st 'tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin;"

and the well-known line

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!"

and in that fine expression of Timon, the dying deck "-where he invests the mere planks of a vessel with all the deeds that have been acted upon them, and colours them with blood and death-it is the Imagination which is evidently at work: so is it also in the case of the "wilderness of monkeys," where the inhabitants of the forest are made to stand for the forest itself

The grand distinction, in short, which exists between poetry and prose is, that the former (independently of its principle of elevation) presents two or more ideas, linked or massed together, where the latter would offer only one. And hence arises the comparative unpopularity of the former with ordinary readers, who profer humble rhyme to poetry, and a single idea to a complicated one, inasmuch as it saves them from the fatigue of thinking. And the distinction between Imagination and Fancy is simply, that the former altogether changes and remodels the original idea, impregnating

it with something extraneous; the latter leaves it undisturbed, but associates it with things to which, in some view or other, it bears a resemblance.

In the foregoing examples of the operation of Imagination and Fancy, the effects produced by each are poetry. If Shakspeare had written

or

"Thou think'st it much that this most violent storm

Should wet us to the skin,"

"How sweet the moonlight shines upon this bank”—“

(although the last line might still have been musical), he would certainly have written prose, and nothing more. When Cleopatra says,

"Have I the aspic in my lips?"

the double idea may not be so obvious, but it is still there: the reptile is confounded with its power (its poison), and made one; the cause and the effect are amalgamated.

Truth was not made for the benefit of infidels, who are its foes; but for willing apprehensions; and, accordingly, it is to these only that Poetry addresses itself. It repels and recoils from the ignorant and the sceptical : the first, from some malformation or want of cultivation of the mind, are unable to comprehend it; and the latter try it by laws to which it is not lawfully subject. When Brutus, in Shakspeare's "Tarquin and Lucrece,"

"Began to clothe his wit in state and pride,"

we feel that this is not the language of prose; and that, however pregnant the phrase may be to a willing ear, it is not the sober and severe language of a reasoner. Neither of these two last quotations are, as may be easily seen, absolute facts, because, as we have said, poetry is never literally true. Nevertheless, it must not be considered as void of truth because it is not a literal transcript of nature, or of ordinary life were it so, we should never sympathise with it. On the contrary, it contains, as it were, the essence of truth, and is a concentration of its scattered powers. It is a world different from our own, but not in opposition to it; moved on the whole by the same passions, and subject to the same influences, as ourselves. It may be that some scene or character is lifted entirely out of ordinary nature, as in the case of Satan, or the Red Cross Knight, Canibal, Ariel, and Oberon ; yet these, and all other grand fictions, are true to themselves, and maintain their proportions like a simple metaphor; and we shall generally find, that the natural passions prevail even in the most fantastic creations of the Muse.

Every one who has considered the subject will own that it is often impossible to justify the finest things in poetry to an unwilling mind, or upon the ordinary principles of logic. And the question which arises on this discovery is which is imperfect?-the law, or the art? For our parts, we think the former. When Milton tells us of "darkness visible!” we feel that he has uttered a fine paradox; we feel its truth, but cannot prove it. And when, in that appalling passage where the poet stands face to face with Night and Chaos, in their dark pavilion, "spread wide on the wasteful deep," and says that

how is it possible to reconcile such expressions to a mere prosaic understanding?"Darkness" is, strictly speaking, "absence of light;" how then shall we say that it is visible when we see only by the aid of light? And with respect to the "Name" of Demogorgon, which "stands" by Orcus and Ades, how can such a phrase be justified by the rules of reason? Nevertheless, it is as magnificent as words can make it. It is clothed in a dark and spectral grandeur, and presses upon our apprehensions like a mighty dream. Who is there that would give up such things for the sake of logic? May not the truth be, that logic, which is the weapon of prose, touches not the airy nature of poetry? or that the laws of reason are at present too imperfect to make the divinity of poetry clear to human capacity? It is well known that our senses are perpetually deceived, and that our reasoning faculties are incompetent to the understanding of many of the phenomena of the external world. Is it not, then, fair to suppose, that the finer intuitive movements of the mind and feeling may also escape? Assuredly, the sense which apprehends these grand expressions of Milton, is finer and loftier than the hard scepticism which denies them. Why then should the one give place to the other? In the same predicament with Milton is Shakspeare perpetually. When, by a strong effort of the imagination, he fuses two ideas into one, the cause, perhaps, and the consequence; or when he arrays a bare and solitary thought with all the pomp and circumstance which surround it-talking of the "dying deck”—we admire the prodigious boldness of the figure, and rest contented, without trying it by the rules of common language. It is like thousands of others, beyond the jurisdiction of prose.

The mind which cannot comprehend poetry may be said to be wanting in a sense. Yet such are precisely the minds which criticise poetry the most narrowly. They try it by the prosaic laws, which they do comprehend, and set up for judges on the ground of their own defects! - Nevertheless, we do not wish to claim for poetry the exemptions of the jus divinum. Poetry is subject to reason-not indeed as prose is subject, throughout all its images, but independently of its imagery and elevation of sentiment; and it must not therefore be tried by a standard to which it does not profess to assimilate itself, nor by rules with which it is in its nature at variance. It can never be made good, and demonstrated like a syllogism. But, as it springs from, and is addressed to, the imagination, so can it be subject to strict laws only when the laws of that faculty shall be discovered.

but

We have already quoted several instances of poetical phraseology; it is not alone in such expressions that poetry consists. The idea of a character, a person, a place, may be poetically conceived, as well as the expression in which it is dressed. Thus the idea of Milton's "Satan" is purely imaginative and poetical, as are the conceptions of Titania and Oberon, Ariel and Caliban, and the cloudy Witches of Macbeth. Macbeth himself is poctical, on another ground, i. e. from the circumstances into which he is impelled, as are, in like manner, Hamlet, Juliet, and Lear. A chimera, a leviathan, a gorgon, the snake which was fabled to encircle the world, the sylphs and the giants, Echo, Polyphemus, shadowy Demogorgon, Death and the curling Sin, the ocean-born Venus, and Pallas, who sprang out armed from the brain of Jove-are all poetical. Milton's vision of hellSpenser's palaces and haunted woods-the Inferno of Dante-the faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, and her home in Arcady-the Arabian fictions,

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with their silent cities and blazing sights, in air and under ground; their gems and dreams of riches; their fairies, genii, and enchanters; their men turned into marble; and in short, all that world of wonder which illuminated ancient Bagdad, or grew up like a garden of enchantment on the banks of the Tigris-are all fictions of the imagination, and, as such, have claims to be distinguished as the offspring of the great family of poetry. Again, the meeting of Gabriel and Satan, at the end of the fourth book of Paradise Lost, where the squadron of angels turn" fiery red "—and the stature of Satan, angry and dilated, "reached the sky" the speed of Puck, who puts a girdle round abouth the earth" in forty minutes-the ghost who revisits the "glimpses of the moon"-Una, taming the forest lion by her beauty-the iron man-the fretted and wealthy cave of Mammonmust all have been poetical, in whatever diction the ideas had been clothed. The staple of Poetry then is imagery: so that even where it deals with abstract ideas and indefinite objects, it generally moulds them into shape. It is thus that certain virtues and qualities of the mind are brought visibly before us. Unfortunately, HOPE and CHARITY, FAITH, and LOVE, and PITY, etc. have now become commonplaces; but they were, notwithstanding, amongst the first and simpler creations of the art. In another way, mere inanimate matter is raised to life, or its essence extracted for some poetical purpose. Thus the air, in its epithet "airy," is applied to motion, and the "sunny" locks of beauty are extracted from the day. Thus the moon becomes a vestal, and the night is clothed in a starry train; the sea is a monster or a god; the winds and the streams are populous with spirits; and the sun is a giant rejoicing in his strength. Again, as the essence of poetry, generally speaking (for it is sometimes otherwise, in the case of sounds and perfumes), consists in its imagery, so its excellence varies in proportion as those images are appropriate and perfect. The imagination, which acts like an intuition, is seldom wrong; but when a thought is spread out into similes, by the aid of fancy, it not unfrequently becomes unnatural. Again, the figures or images may be repeated till they run into cold conceits, or they may not amalgamate and harmonise with the original idea. Petrarch, Doune, Cowley, and Crashaw, all men of genius, offended in these points. They trusted often to their ingenuity instead of their feeling, and so erred. Excellence is not necessarily the property of imagination or of fancy, which may be lofty or tame, clear or obscure, in proportion to the mind of the poet. Nor must we forget that poetry, which depends at least as much upon the vivid sensibility of the writer as upon his intellect, depends also somewhat upon his discretion. When Crashaw, in his "Music's Duel," speaking of the nightingale, who is contending for the palm of music with a man,

says,

"Her supple breast thrills out

Sharp airs and staggers in a warbling doubt
Of dallying sweetness,"-

we feel instantly that the idea is overloaded, and extended beyond our sympathy. There are four distinct epithets made use of to express a single idea. This argues poverty in the writer, at least as much as a superabundance of imagery. So Cowley maintains a metaphor throughout a whole poem; as in the one entitled " Coldness," where he begins by comparing his love to water, and goes on to show how it is acted upon by kindness and rigour, the one causing it to flow, and the other to freeze. This is the masquerade of poetry. On the contrary, when Bolinbroke goes,

"As confident as is the falcon's flight,"

to do battle with Mowbray, and Eneas the Trojan, bearing a challenge to the idle Greeks, cries out,

"Trumpet, blow loud!

Send thy brass voice through all these lazy tents"

we admit at once the fine keeping of the images. Again, when this same Eneas diffidently enquires for the leader Agamemnon (whose "topless deputation," on the other hand, the parasite of Achilles mimics), saying,

"I ask that I might waken reverence,
And bid the cheek be ready with a blush,
Modest as morning when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phœbus,"

we feel that the picture is perfect.

We have characterised certain things as poetry; but we must not be understood to say, that all which may fairly be called poetry is thus, word by word, impregnated with Imagination and Fancy. We have extracted the essence; whereas the cup of poetry, even at the strongest, is not all essence but, as wine is not composed entirely of the grape, so is the rich Castalian mixed with the clear waters of the earth, and thereby rendered palatable to all. It requires, like durable gold, some portion of alloy in order to preserve itself through the currency. It is a Doric temple, where all is not exclusively divine, but partakes, in common with others, somewhat of the structure of ordinary buildings. So, in poetry, all is not of the "Dorian mood," or of the "order" of poetry, but is intermingled and made stable by a due addition of other materials. It is by these means that poetry acquires its popularity. The most imaginative writings are assuredly but little relished by the common or uninitiated reader: they require too much of the labour of thought-too much quickness of apprehension and power of combination, on the part of readers (as well as authors), to be likely to please generally. A maxim or a sentiment conveyed in prose, especially if it be such as flatters our self-love, will produce twice the effect on the crowd that pure poety can ever hope to accomplish. Dr. Johnson's favourite lines,

"I dare do all that may become a man:
Who dares do more, is none"-

act like electricity; yet they are neither poetry, nor, strictly speaking, truth. They involve a non sequitur, as Partridge would have termed it; and were probably flung out by Shakspeare from his boundless hoards as a plausible bait for the crowd. Even in him and Milton, our two most undisputed poets, there are many striking, and even beautiful passages interspersed, which can claim but little distinction from prose, in regard to mere phraseology, except that they are compressed within the limits of heroic verse. Thus, those two bulky lines in " Troilus and Cressida"

"The large Achilles, on his press'd bed lolling,
From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause'

although they present a grand, bold picture, and seem actually burthened with the words which they bear, are not, with respect to phrase or expression, essentially poetical. Neither have those sad and beautiful words of Antony,