of Fair Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor: With that she dash'd her on the lips, So dyed double red: Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled. There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as follows:-First, that which presents to the mind any object or circumstance in everyday life; as when we imagine a man holding a sword, or looking out of a window ;-Second, that which presents real, but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;-Third, that which combines character and events directly imitated from real life, with initative realities of its own invention; as the probable parts of the histories of Priam and Macbeth, or what may be called natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;-Fourth, that which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as Homer's gods, and Shakspeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto's hippogriff, &c. ;-Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image, introduces another: sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the coming of night-time; sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton's "motes that people the sunbeams;" sometimes in concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future, 66 as in the starry Galileo" of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet "murdered" applied to the yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio, So the two brothers and their murder'd man sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly winding its "sultry horn," which epithet contains the heat of a summer's day ;-Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine; as when in Lycidas, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love— Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno, -Orlando Innamorato, canto iii. or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very light in the chamber and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself; or in the "witch element" of the tragedy of Macbeth and the May-day night of Faust ;Seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge's Christabel, where the unsuspecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden to go to bed: Quoth Christabel, So let it be ! a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter l's. I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into the Friar of Orders Grey, out of Beaumont and Fletcher : Weep no more, lady, weep no more, Thy sorrow is in vain ; For violets pluck'd the sweetest showers And Shakspeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader's mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a constituent part of the highest poetic faculty. The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor is Shakspeare's moonlight "sleeping" on a bank; but half his poetry may be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures none, out of the pale of mythology and the East, are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to Shakspeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described by her inventor in the story of Peter Wilkins; and in point of treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's Christabel, may rank even with the creations of Shakspeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakspeare had bile and nightmare enough in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,-in Scripture, the "mighty hunter " and builder of the tower of Babel,-in Dante, a tower of a man in his own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunder-clap is a whisper, and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost tongue! Tl transformations are too odious to quote; but of the towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the "fearful joy" of a specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell, when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to the spot from which it came. He there discovered, through the dusk, what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these circular pits: Come quando la nebbia si dissipa, Ed io scorgeva già d' alcun la faccia, Le spalle, e il petto, e del ventre gran parte, |