court these metamorphoses, and agree in honouring them with the name of poetry?

There can be but one reply. Strip such examples, one by one, of those mere extraneous circumstances (rhyme and metre) we have distinguished from the intrinsic nature of poetry; and, again, from all else (truth, passion, and the like) which, though no mere externals, leave yet untouched what we all mean by a poetical development of truth, or a poetical expression of passion: one discriminating quality will be found remaining- they appeal to the imagination.

This I take to be the ultimate fact the critical answer, therefore, to the question, What is poetry? I am well aware of certain objections: they are, I think, more obvious than substantial.

The

To say that things not conventionally called poetry make, as in the case selected, the same appeal, is but another mode of saying that the poetical instinct will not be confined to conventional channels. question is not where? but what is poetry? I keep my finger on the indestructible phrases "poetical prose," and "prosaic verse"-phrases that could have no possible meaning, if the conventionalities of "Prose" and "Verse" were all we asked for.

Nor let us be driven from our conclusion by that higher quality of prose called eloquence. No doubt much of eloquent writing and speaking is highly figurative; and when we say that prose is the natural language of matter of fact, and poetry the putting fact or fiction, thought or feeling, in an imaginative form, the undeniable character of eloquence may be objected against us. Yet the distinction may remain.

WHAT IS POETRY? — A FURTHER QUESTION. 89

intact. Eloquence is not high-flown, nor even figurative language; but the forcible expression of our thoughts and feelings. It is speaking out and speaking home. Such speech may need no figure. We have actually stereotyped the phrase "unadorned eloquence." Of poetry it may be said truly, as of Goldsmith it was said epitaphically, " nihil tetigit quod non ornavit" (he touched nothing he did not adorn), it is in its nature. Of eloquence there can be no possible doubt that it no sooner begins to look for ornament, but it is in deadly peril of becoming tinsel. The freest possible indulgence of imagery would but make it the "poetical prose

spoken of.

we have

And, on the other hand, to say that no poem consists wholly of what we have taken for the discriminating quality, is but saying that Poetry has her material substance as well as prose. What I assert is, that this material substance takes a poetic form,that is to say, becomes poetry, as it assumes an imaginative character.

We have observed that Carlyle's definition would not square with Hall's example. It would square with few examples that I know of. We have seen also that Pre-Raffaellitism has endorsed that definition. It could do no less: it is monogeneous:

"Pre-Raffaellitism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising truth, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature and from nature only." (Edin. Lectures, p. 227.)

Such a principle can have no place for Robert

Hall's poetic vision. "Nature and nature only' never saw the funeral procession of a still-born book. Such a principle would be no more tolerant of Wordsworth's haunted childhood, nor of Byron's walking vessel, nor of Keble's “everlasting chime.” You have but to trace the consequences; and you will find that Pre-Raffaellitism is incompatible with all we are used to call the " Poetry of Art.”

And yet Pre-Raffaellitism has not formally sued for divorce. On the contrary, we have, in the second volume of " Modern Painters," a very elaborate account of imagination: and we are told in the " Edinburgh Lectures" that

"the Pre-Raffaellites have enormous powers of imagination." (P. 230.)

There remains, therefore, the inevitable further question, "What is Imagination?”

CHAP. XI.

WHAT IS IMAGINATION?

PERHAPS the first stroke towards an answer would be to say that imagination is the sight of absent objects, or their qualities; and that, since those objects, however real, are absent, what is seen is but the image only, and the faculty discerning them is therefore called "Imagination."

I need tell no one that all the objects of fancy are not real. Yet are not the most unreal of those objects pure creations. It may be questioned whether it be within the powers of humanity to create, properly speaking, one single elementary idea. It is needful, therefore, to distinguish imagination no less from memory than from actual sight.

And the distinction is very simple. Memory is the recollection of a thing as once actually existing: Imagination, the conception of it intrinsically; irrespective, that is to say, of its historical existence: I might almost say (and this touches a vital point in our difference with Pre-Raffaellitism) without the slightest care so far as imagination is concerned-if it ever had an existence.

Hence, memory has no power that can in any sense be called creative. It is simply the retention of certain impressions in their proper form as near

as may be; and the most perfect act of memory would be the removal (were it possible) of the veil of time. Imagination, on the other hand, is rather the recollection of the qualities of the object; sometimes in possible, sometimes in impossible combinations: or, if of the object itself, then what I may call the resurrection rather than the recovered sight of it, with a resurrection body and etherialised attributes.

It is, then, in the giving to imagination this power of seeing qualities in their abstract nature, of selecting, analysing, combining, refining, ennobling them, which we cannot assign to memory,-that we are all accustomed to distinguish between the two.

Hence, whatever the dependence of the imagination on the actual elements of God's creation; and, however possible to conceive an analysis that should dismember, one by one, all the objects of fancy, and show how this came from such a source, and that from such another; and, however all this may seem to involve the exercise of memory, we never speak of the two as identical: and few of us - not being Pre-Raffaellites—would call a man imaginative, though he never forgot a single feature of any object he had once looked on.

There are other points to which I need give but few words. Imagination may summon images, even of thought and feeling. Yet imagination can neither think nor feel. I cannot conceive of an unfeeling poet. The very definition of imagination supposes the image to have had its prototype; and I take it for granted that there is at least some exercise of