What never mortal bore, I think, on earth,
To lift unto my lips the hand of him

Who slew my boys."

He ceased; and there arose

Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;
And taking Priam by the hand, he gently
Put him away; for both shed tears to think
Of other times; the one, most bitter ones
For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness
Lay right before Achilles: and the other,

For his own father now, and now his friend;

And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd.
But when divine Achilles had refresh'd

His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left

His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,
And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took
Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.

O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, if he had thought of it. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind, but without a genius for narra

سا

tion, the action would have been encumbered or
diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-con-
templative would have given us too many remarks;
the over-lyrical, a style too much carried away; the
over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes; the
unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not
even those. We should have been told nothing of
the "
grey chin," of the house hearing them as they
moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man
aside; much less of that yearning for his father,
which made the hero tremble in every limb. Writers
without the greatest passion and power do not feel
in this way, nor are capable of expressing the
feeling; though there is enough sensibility and
imagination all over the world to enable mankind
to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth
into their hearts.

The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison's Cato is full of them.

Passion unpitied and successless love
Plant daggers in my breast.

I've sounded my Numidians, man by man,
And find them ripe for a revolt.

The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex.

Of the same kind is his "courting the yoke”— "distracting my very heart"-"calling up all" one's "father" in one's soul" working every nerve"-" copying a bright example;" in short, the whole play, relieved now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison's time,-the Mariamne of Fenton :

Mariamne, with superior charms,
Triumphs o'er reason: in her look she bears
A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;
Fair as the first idea beauty prints

In the young lover's soul; a winning grace
Guides every gesture, and obsequious love
Attends on all her steps.

"Triumphing o'er reason" is an old acquaintance of every body's. "Paradise in her look” is from the Italian poets through Dryden. "Fair as the first idea," &c. is from Milton, spoilt;—" winning grace" and "steps" from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a great writer borrows, he improves.

To come now to Fancy,—she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies

in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations.

- Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air.

Troilus and Cressida, Act iii. sc. 3.

That is imagination;-the strong mind sympathizing with the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.

In love! I that have been love's whip!
A very beadle to a humorous sigh!—

A domineering pedant o'er the boy,

This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, &c.
Love's Labour Lost, Act iii. sc. 1.

That is fancy;-a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector.

Silent icicles

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Coleridge's Frost at Midnight.

That, again, is imagination ;—analogical sympathy;

and exquisite of its kind it is.

"You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt."

Twelfth Night, Act iii. sc. 2.

And that is fancy;-one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the "Dutchman's beard" is made to represent the lady!

:

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy: Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest, the Fairy Queen, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body ;-of "images" in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (Pavтаσμа, appearance, phantom), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination. Viola, in Twelfth Night, speaking of some beautiful music, says :

It gives a very echo to the seat,
Where Love is throned.