objects. Imagination is the power of depicting ;-fancy, of evoking and combining. The imagination is formed by patient observation: the fancy by a voluntary activity in shifting the scenery of the mind. The more accurate the imagination, the more safely may a painter or a poet undertake a delineation or a description, without the presence of the objects to be characterised. The more versatile the fancy, the more original and striking will be the decorations produced." Syn. 242. Fancy, it is said, evokes-imagination depicts-consequently imagination is inert; she has nothing to depict, until fancy has evoked the images which are to be depicted. Imagination is a portrait painter, with her pencil and pallet in her hand, her canvas on her easel, awaiting the arrival of her sitter. A result surely never contemplated by this very ingenious writer; but one as assuredly inevitable from his mode of expressing himself. Before we proceed to state the sentiments of the POET upon the matters at issue, we are induced to communicate our own; and, at the outset, we beg our more learned readers to call to remembrance, that the two most eminent critics of the Roman empire, Longinus and Quintillian, the one as remarkable for the ardour of his genius as the other for his taste and judgment, never thought of this distribution of the mind into separate critic and poetic powers. They do not talk of the fancy or the imagination, but of fancies and images. And to these names, the one of phantasiai, and the other of visiones, they give pretty closely the same explanation. "We," says Quintillian, "give the name of visio to that which the Greeks call pavraoia, by which the images of absent things are so represented to the mind that we seem to discern them with our eyes, and have them before us."* The Grecian, by all the Nine inspired," produces the appeal of Orestes to the mother whom he had murdered ;-And the pitiful and affectionate reply of his sister deserves to be added. "ORESTES. Oh! mother, I implore thee, goad not against me the blood-eyed and snake-haired Virgins. They themselves are leaping close against me. "ELECTRA. Stay, O wretched one! stay quiet in thy bed! nothing of those things which thou seemest to see." For thou seest "Here," exclaims the critic, "the Poet himself saw the Furies; and what he fancied he compelled also the auditors almost to see." Another example of poetical imagery, given by Longinus, is from a lost drama of Euripides, in which Phoebus is described giving his last instructions to his ambitious son; and not content with this, the parent hastens to follow the son, Zeipiov vwra, and with warning voice exclaims, ' Drive that way, now this; turn your chariot. Here!'"'' "May you not say," observes Longinus, "that the mind' (not the fancy, not the imagination, but the whole mind) "of the writer ascends the chariot with Phaeton, and that, sharing his danger, he flies along with the horses." Plutarch had before referred to the scene in Orestes, in illustration of the distinction drawn by himself between phantasy and phantasm; and for the same purposes he refers to the vision of Theoclymenus, when the Seer perceives the suitors moved to unspontaneous laughter; and altogether dementated by Pallas Minerva. * Has imagines quisquis bene conceperit, is erit in affectibus potentissimus. Hunc quidam dicunt évþavraoɩwrov, qui sibi res, voces, actus, secundum verum optime finget. Lib. vi. c. 2. "Ah, miserable men! what curse is this That takes you now? Night wraps herself around With peals of groans-and, oh! what floods ye weep! I see the walls and arches dappled thick With gore! The vestibule is throng'd, the court Of slaughtered men, sinking into the gloom Of Erebus! the sun is blotted out From heaven, and midnight whelms you premature." Cowper, Od. b. 20. The visions selected by the two Grecian critics are as different as raving maduess, prophetic enthusiasm, and poetic fury could create; and yet they do not dream of any classification of them under different powers of mind. The phantasia of the inspired Ithacan forces upon our memory the Bard of Gray, to whom we must listen for a moment: "Dear lost companions of my tuneful art, After this bold apostrophe, the Bard, entranced by the overpowering energy of thought, sees these his lost companions in the character of avengers of their native land, sitting upon the distant cliffs, and weaving with bloody hand the tissue of Edward's line. The prophetic images continue to pour themselves upon him in so rapid and multitudinous a presentment, that, as if unable longer to gaze upon the spectacle, the Bard exclaims, in a burst of almost frenzied deprecation, "Visions of glory! spare my aching sight; Ye unborn ages, rush not on my soul!" We cannot forbear to add a short quotation from an old divine, in whose writings our POET takes just delight. "A man is sometimes so impressed with the false fires and glarings of temptation that he cannot see the secret turpitude and deformity; but when the cloud and veil is off, then comes the tormentor from within. Then the calamity swells, and conscience increases the trouble, when God sends war, or sickness, or death. It was Saul's case, when he lost that fatal battle in which the ark was taken. He thought he saw the priests of the Lord accusing him before God. And this hath been an old opinion of the world, that in the days of their calamity, wicked persons are accused by those whom they have injured. Then every bush is a wild beast, and every shadow is a ghost, and every glow-worm is a dead man's candle, and every lantern is a spirit." The practice of these so highly and so justly esteemed instructors in the principles of criticism has the merit, in our opinion, of being established on good sense and sound philosophy. The invention of new powers or faculties, and new operations of the mind, to support systems, or to answer an emergency, has been the ignis fatuus by which founders of sects or teachers of neoteric refinements have suffered themselves to be misled, from the earliest days of metaphysical subtilty to the present hour. Anxious, however, as we are to escape from these erroneous paths, and pursue the course of our ancient masters, we shall so far conform ourselves to the phraseology of the different writers, whose creeds we are canvassing, as to ascribe a fancy to the fancy, and an imagination to the imagination; thus reducing the discussion to some palpable form, inasmuch as we have now to determine, what is a fancy, and what is an imagination; or what is that to which fancy may distinctively be applied, and what that to which imagination: for the whole dispute is about the imposition of a name. If we resort to Bacon, and it is rarely that we can do so in vain, he will supply us with a clue. Speaking of imagination, by which, as he is then considering it, he understands, "the representation of a particular thought," he says, that it is, inter alia, "of things present, or as if they were present; for," he adds, "I comprehend in this, imagination feigned, and at pleasure; as if one should imagine such a man to be in the vestments of the Pope, or to have wings." Now, instead of saying, we imagine a man to have wings, or the imagination presents to us a man having wings, the appropriate distinctive expression seems to be, we fancy a man to have wings, or the fancy presents to us a man having wings. : The imagination presents the man and the wings separately the fancy presents them combined in the same impersonation. And this we shall contend to be the peculiar province of fancy; and we shall do so from a conviction, that we are thus led to a distinction, which may be always clearly preserved in poetical imagery. It is an observation of a great historian of Nature (Buffon), that whatever it was possible for his goddess to produce has been produced. Suppose then an enthusiastic admirer of her works, giving free play to his speculations, should present to his mind-in one conformation-the constituent parts, some of a bird and some of a beast; that he should engraft the beak of a duck on the head of a quadruped; that he should give to it webbed feet, and clothe its body with a thick, soft, beaver-like fur; and, in many minuter particulars, should unite in one animal the features of more, of bird and beast: this presentation to the mind, a creature and creation of its own, seems properly to deserve the denomination of a fancy; and the creative power, since it is to be ascribed to a monarchic power, the fancy. But suppose such an animal should actually be detected in existence, (and such we are told is the fact),* should be seen and be described; then the representation of it, whether to him who had seen, or to him who had only read the description, would be an imagination; and the representing faculty, the imagination. On the first supposition, the existence of an animai with such a conformation of parts is the work of fancy; but yet imagination must supply every one of those parts. Every fancied whole must be constructed of imagined parts. Imagination, exclusive of her own domain, is thus a subsidiary potentate in that of fancy. So in the famous conceit of Horace, that a painter should unite in one picture the neck of a horse to the head of a man; and that he should cover the limbs, collected from animals of divers kinds, with variegated feathers. The existence of a creature, conformed of parts so alien to each other, would be the painter's fancy; and the creation of his fancy. But when the finished picture should be exposed to beholders, then the subsequent representation of the painted monster to the mind of a beholder would be an imagination, and the representing faculty the imagination. To the fancy we ascribe the visions of the Greek Madman, the Greek Prophet, the English Bard, and the English Divine: these are the phantasmata of Plutarch. To the imagination, the vision of the father following the son, and shouting to warn and guide him in his perilous course : this is the phantasia of Plutarch. But we have to deal with a POET, and we therefore again resort to poetry for aid in illustrating and confirming our opinions. Mr. Taylor remarks, and the remark may be true, that Macpherson had more fancy than imagination. It is, indeed, quite possible, that a writer may create by impersonation; and that he may not be able to adorn his own creation with characteristic attributes. Collins was a poet of a different order; and his far-famed Ode on the Passions, once so familiar to the ear of youth, will enable us to display in comparison the peculiar characteristics of fancy and imagination, acting in concert to produce one scenic effect. The Passions, as so many existencies, thronging to the cell of Music, snatching the instruments of sound from the myrtles upon which they hung; and their mad resolution, each to prove his own expressive power; the several impersonations of Fear and Anger, Despair and Hope, Revenge and Jealousy, and Pity, of Melancholy and of Cheerfulness, are the pure creations of Fancy; but she must resort to the aid of Imagination for a supply of imagery, from which she may borrow appropriate attributes, actions, passions, with which she may endow these her creatures. It is from these that she must select the picture of Fear, recoiling at the sounds himself had made; of the rude clash and hurried hand of Anger, and of the enchanted smile and waving golden hair of Hope; of the low sullen sounds of Despair; of the numbers of Jealousy, fixed on nought; of the notes, in which, by distance made more sweet, Melancholy poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul; and, lastly, of the inspiring air, ringing through dale and thicket, blown by Cheerfulness, with bow across her shoulder, and buskins gemmed with morning dew. We now approach the Preface of our POET, in which he explains his tenets, and to the poems which he professes to have composed in consistency with them. Here we are to encounter a combination of precept and practice, with the experto credite of a consummate master in his art. We shall not, we suspect, gain much ground, either in the estimation of the author, or that of our reader, when we commence with an acknowledgment that we suspect ourselves unable to understand the tenets sufficiently to reduce them to precepts by which the practice might be tried; or to discriminate whether each poem can, in conformity with them, pretend to be composed under the influence of one poetic power in preference to the other. We are perfectly sure that the manly and liberal mind of the Poet will not fancy that under this acknowledgment it is intended to couch the slightest disrespect; and we can as confidently assure him that it is, on the other hand, from respect, a just respect, to opinions entertained by him, that we have thought it worth while to continue so prolonged a discussion, as, we are apprehensive, this must now begin to appear. Our readers, however, will revive their flagging attention (if any have permitted it to flag) when we apprize them that it is to Wordsworth, and to him almost alone, to whom they will now be called upon to lend their ears. The POET remarks, upon the explanation of Mr. Taylor which we have above quoted, "It is not easy to find how imagination, thus explained, differs from distinct remembrance of images, or fancy, from quick and "If the above words bear the above meaning, and no other, what term is left to designate that faculty of which the poet is all compact; he whose eye glances from earth to heaven, whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt in turning to shape; or what is left to characterise fancy as insinuating herself into the heart of objects with creative activity? "Imagination," he continues," in the sense of the word, as giving a title to a class of the following poems, has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects, but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed. laws." It is to be feared, that, according to this expurgatory ban, even the two "wonderful stanzas," as they are reported to have been called by Gray, must be placed, in something like disgrace, to the score of memory alone: indeed, it seems scarcely possible to fix upon any saving clause in our Poet's edict by which we may rescue from the same debasement the lines in which Eve describes the sweetness of rising morn and grateful evening mild. But if memory be pronounced commensurate to the office of performing so much that is excellent, it may, perhaps, be possible to associate her with sentiments and feelings-not powers-not operations of the mind -that will enable her to render the supposition of any superior power entirely superfluous. Let the reader judge-here are the lines: "Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet, Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet." P. L. b. 6. "But who the melodies of morn can tell? The wild brook babbling down the mountain side; The lowing herd; the sheepfold's simple bell; The pipe of early shepherd dim descried In the lone valley; echoing far and wide The clamorous horn along the cliffs above; The hollow murmur of the ocean tide; "The cottage curs at early pilgrim bark; Crown'd with her pail, the tripping milkmaid sings; |