of the wind upon the corn; Satan endowed with godlike strength and endurance in that mighty line, "like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved," with infinitude of size the next instant, and with all the vagueness and terribleness of spiritual power, by the "horror plumed," and the "what seemed both spear and shield."

from imagina

The third function of Fancy, already spoken of as subordinate to § 5. The third office of Fancy this of the imagination, is the highest of which she is capable; like distinguished the imagination, she beholds in the things submitted to her treatment tion contemplathings different from the actual; but the suggestions she follows are tive. not in their nature essential in the object contemplated; and the images resulting, instead of illustrating, may lead the mind away from it, and change the current of contemplative feeling; for as in her operation parallel to Imagination penetrative, we saw her dwelling upon external features, while the nobler sister Faculty, entered within: so now, when both, from what they see and know in their immediate object, are conjuring up images illustrative or elevatory of it, the fancy necessarily summons those of mere external relationship, and therefore of unaffecting influence; while the imagination, by every ghost she raises, tells tales about the prison house, and therefore never loses her power over the heart, nor her unity of emotion. On the other hand, the regardant or contemplative action of Fancy is in this different from, and in this nobler, than that mere seizing and likenesscatching operation we saw in her before; that when contemplative, she verily believes in the truth of the vision she has summoned, loses sight of actuality, and beholds the new and spiritual image faithfully and even seriously: whereas before, she summoned no spiritual image, but merely caught the vivid actuality, or the curious resemblance of the real object; not that these two operations are separate, for the Fancy passes gradually from mere vivid right of reality, and witty suggestion of likeness, to a ghostly sight of what is unreal; and through this, in proportion as she begins to feel, she rises towards and partakes of Imagination itself; for Imagination and Fancy are continually united, and it is necessary, when they are so, carefully to distinguish the feelingless part which is Fancy's, from the sentient part, which is Imagination's. Let us take a few instances. Here is fancy, first, very beautiful, in her simple capacity of likeness-catching;

"To-day we purpose-ay, this hour we mount
To spur three leagues towards the Apennine.
Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the Eglantine."

Seizing on the outside resemblances of bead form, and on the slipping from their threading bough one by one, the fancy is content to lose the heart of the thing, the solemnity of prayer: or perhaps I do the glorious poet wrong in saying this, for the sense of a sun worship and orison in beginning its race, may have been in his mind; and so far as it was so, the passage is imaginative and not fanciful. But that which most readers would accept from it, is the mere flash of the external image, in whose truth the fancy herself does not yet believe, and therefore is not yet contemplative. Here, however, is fancy believing in the images she creates :

"It feeds the quick growth of the serpent-vine,
And the dark linked ivy tangling wild

And budding, blown, or odour faded blooms,
Which star the winds with points of coloured light
As they rain through them; and bright golden globes
Of fruit suspended in their own green heaven."

It is not, observe, a mere likeness that is caught here; but the flowers and fruit are entirely deprived by the fancy of their material existence, and contemplated by her seriously and faithfully as stars and worlds; yet it is only external likeness that she catches; she forces the resemblance, and lowers the dignity of the adopted image.

Next take two delicious stanzas of Fancy regardant (believing in her creations), followed by one of heavenly imagination, from Wordsworth's address to the daisy:

"A Nun demure-of lowly port;

Or sprightly maiden-of Love's court,

In thy simplicity the sport

Of all temptations.

A Queen in crown of rubies drest,

A starveling in a scanty vest,

Are all as seems to suit thee best,

Thy appellations.

I see thee glittering from afar,

And then thou art a pretty star,

Not quite so fair as many are

In heaven above thee.

Yet like a star, with glittering crest,
Self-poised in air thou seem'st to rest ;-
May peace come never to his nest
Who shall reprove thee.

Sweet flower-for by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,

I call thee, and to that cleave fast.

Sweet silent creature,

That breath'st with me, in sun and air,

Do thou, as thou art wont, repair

My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature."

instances.

Observe how spiritual, yet how wandering and playful, the fancy is § 6. Various in the first two stanzas, and how far she flies from the matter in hand; never stopping to brood on the character of any one of the images she summons, and yet for a moment truly seeing and believing in them all; while in the last stanza the imagination returns with its deep feeling to the heart of the flower, and "cleaves fast" to that. Compare the operation of the imagination in Coleridge, on one of the most trifling objects that could possibly have been submitted to its action :

"The thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not:
Only that film which fluttered on the grate
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live,
Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets; every where,
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of thought."

Lastly, observe the sweet operation of Fancy regardant, in the following well-known passage from Scott, where both her beholding and transforming powers are seen in their simplicity:

"The rocky summits-split and rent,

Formed turret, dome, or battlement,

Or seemed fantastically set

With cupola or minaret.

Nor were these earth-born castles bare,
Nor lacked they many a banner fair,
For, from their shivered brows displayed,
Far o'er th' unfathomable glade,

All twinkling with the dew-drop sheen,
The Briar-rose fell, in streamers green,-

And creeping shrubs of thousand dyes
Waved in the west wind's summer sighs."

Let the reader refer to this passage, with its pretty tremulous conclusion above the pine tree, "where glistening streamers waved and danced," and then compare with it the following, where the Imagination operates on a scene nearly similar:

"Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemm'd

The struggling brook: tall spires of windle strae

Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope
And nought but knarled roots of ancient pines,
Branchless and blasted, clenched, with grasping roots,
Th' unwilling soil.

A gradual change was here,
Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,

The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white: and where irradiate dewy eyes
Had shone, gleam stony orbs; so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds
And musical motions.

Where the pass extends
Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,
And seems with its accumulated crags
To overhang the world; for wide expand
Beneath the wan stars, and descending moon,

Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams,
Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom
Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills
Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge
Of the remote horizon. The near scene,
In naked and severe simplicity,

Made contrast with the universe. A Pine
Rock-rooted, stretch'd athwart the vacancy
Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast
Yielding one only response at each pause,
In most familiar cadence, with the howl,
The thunder, and the hiss of homeless streams,
Mingling its solemn song.

In this last passage, the mind never departs from its solemn pos

session of the solitary scene, the imagination only giving weight, meaning, and strange human sympathies to all its sights and sounds.

In that from Scott1-the fancy, led away by the outside resemblance of floating form and hue to the banners, loses the feeling and possession of the scene, and places herself in circumstances of character completely opposite to the quietness and grandeur of the natural objects; this would have been unjustifiable, but that the resemblance occurs to the mind of the monarch, rather than to that of the poet; and it is that, which of all others, would have been the most likely to occur at the time; in this point of view it has high imaginative propriety. Of the same fanciful character is that transformation of the tree trunks into dragons noticed before in Turner's Jason; and in the same way this becomes imaginative as it exhibits the effect of Fear in disposing to morbid perception. Compare with it the real and high action of the Imagination on the same matter in Wordsworth's Yew trees (perhaps the most vigorous and solemn bit of forest landscape ever painted) :

"Each particular trunk a growth

Of intertwisted fibres serpentine,

Up coiling and inveterately convolved,

Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks

That threaten the profane."

It is too long to quote, but the reader should refer to it let him note especially, if painter, that pure touch of colour, "by sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged."

In the same way the blasted trunk on the left, in Turner's drawing of the spot where Harold fell at the battle of Hastings, takes, where its boughs first separate, the shape of the head of an arrow; this, which is mere fancy in itself, is imagination as it supposes in the

Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly dreaming of Shelley over clouds and waves with the masculine and magnificent grasp of men and things which we find in Scott; it only happens that these two passages are more illustrative, by the likeness of the scenery they treat, than any others I could have opposed; and that Shelley is peculiarly distinguished by the faculty of Contemplative imagination. Scott's healthy and truthful feeling would not allow him to represent the benighted hunter, provoked by loss of game, horse, and way at once, as indulging in any more exalted flights of imagination than those naturally consequent on the contrast between the night's lodging he expected, and that which befitted him.