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-aye, 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 :

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

And budding, blown, or odor faded blooms,
Which star the winds with points of colored 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 :

stances.

Observe how spiritual, yet how wandering and playful the fancy is in the first two stanzas, and how far she flies from the matter in hand, never stopping to brood on the character of any § 6. Various in- 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; everywhere,
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 brier-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.

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Gray 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, clench'd 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 cast, robed in the lustrous gloom
Of leaden-colored 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
Fielding 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 possession of the solitary scene, the imagination only giving weight, meaning, and strange human sympathies to all its sights and sounds.

In that from Scott,*-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

* 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.

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 (which I consider the most vigorous and solemn bit of forest landscape ever painted) :

It is too long to quote, but the reader should refer to it let him note especially, if painter, that pure touch of color, "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 spectator an excited condition of feeling dependent on the history of the spot.

nervous fancy.

or

I have been led perhaps into too great detail in illustrating these points; but I think it is of no small importance to prove how in all cases the imagination is based upon, and appeals to, § 7. Morbid a deep heart feeling; and how faithful and earnest it is in contemplation of the subject matter, never losing sight of it, or disguising it, but depriving it of extraneous and material accidents, and regarding it in its disembodied essence. I have not, however, sufficiently noted in opposition to it, that diseased action of the fancy which depends more on nervous temperament than intellectual power; and which, as in dreaming, fever, insanity, and other morbid conditions of mind, is frequently a source of daring and inventive conception; and so the visionary appearances resulting from various disturbances. of the frame by passion, and from the rapid tendency of the mind to invest with shape and intelligence the active influences about it, as in the various demons, spirits, and fairies of all imaginative nations; which, however, I consider are no more to be ranked as right creations of fancy or imagination than things actually seen and heard; for the action of the nerves is I suppose the same, whether externally caused, or from within,