Imagination in the modern sense of the term is not supposed to have entered critical discussion until about the second century of our era; yet it is not difficult to find recognition of some of the processes we have been discussing, in the works of Aristotle himself. "Poetry," he says in an oft-quoted passage in the Poetics, "is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity." What is emphasized here is the comprehensiveness of the imaginative synthesis; and when the complementary point is added, that the universal is to be expressed through the individual, we have a statement of the main function of imagination in art. An equally famous dictum of Aristotle's, that the poet "should prefer plausible impossibilities to improbable possibilities," is only another form of the demand for the organic nature of the imaginative creation.

As the minor operations of the imagination in poetry were illustrated from Wordsworth's lines To the Daisy, we may turn to the same poet for an instance of its larger activities. The Lines written above Tintern Abbey are perhaps the richest expression, in moderate compass, of Wordsworth's characteristic imaginative interpretation of Nature. In the account there given of his spiritual development, we learn how he mounted by successive stages to an ever larger and more comprehensive view of the natural universe, the range of his vision ever widening as his insight grew more profound, until he

learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Here we have the poet grappling with an almost cosmic range of phenomena, yet with superb power, and an unsurpassed majesty of expression, re-creating them as parts of a vast imaginative conception. The passage quoted, though remarkably free from pure abstraction, considering the theme, yet hardly does justice to the poem as a whole, which contains elsewhere, in its vivid sketches of natural scenery, the element of the concrete which, as we have stated, belongs to full imaginative expression.

Such an illustration, however, is not without danger; for its very extreme of universality, though related to an individual experience, may tend to confirm the impression, easily gathered from discussions on the universal element in art, that poetry cannot reach great imaginative heights unless when its relation to the great problems of life is explicitly treated. But in such a poem as Coleridge's Kubla Khan we have no wrestling with spiritual questions, no lofty solution of the problem of conduct found through brooding on the beauties of nature. Instead, a thousand impressions received from the senses, from records of Oriental travel, from numberless romantic tales, have been taken in by the author, dissolved as in a crucible by the fierce heat of his imagination, and are poured forth a molten stream of sensuous imagery, incalculable in its variety of suggestion, yet homogeneous, unified, and, despite its fragmentary character, the ultimate expression of a whole romantic world. In such a creation, no less than in the lofty spiritual and ethical contents of a Divine Comedy or a Faust, may we see imagination accomplishing its characteristic work.

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III

But the imagination operates in poetry in still another fashion, in which the process is neither that of "playing with similes," nor the construction of ideal syntheses or extranatural worlds, but appears rather in its capacity to call up in the reader the consciousness of a peculiar mood, or atmosphere, or ecstasy. Great imaginative verse has often a power of moving us to depths of our nature so profound that we can only vaguely grope after the forces which stir us. One hesitates to attempt to describe these results in precise terms, lest in the process limitations should be implied which would contradict the very qualities one is seeking to express. The method of the concrete example is safest here. In such passages as

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come :

Ah, sunflower, weary of Time!

The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, oh :

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the god of love was born :

there is this in common, that all deal with the conception of Time; Time ever-coming and ever-going, without beginning and without end, awful, irresistible, infinite. Parallel to this is the idea that does most to give Paradise Lost its elevation and its power, the everpresent sense of the immensity of space

a dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

And time and place are lost

...

this wild Abyss,

The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave.

The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley is thronged with passages that thrill with the same suggestion :

On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,

sings his Spirit of the Hour.