J 8 Poems of John Keats. 



house might be filled with "large possessions, but no true riches:" and 

 without the store itself, the same author says, "the mind of man would 

 be but a poor destitute naked being, with an everlasting blank spread 

 over it, except the fleeting ideas of the present moment." 



But whatever may be the use and nobleness of its two auxiliaries, 

 imagination is the chief attribute of poetic genius. In every one of 

 its varied shapes this faculty is neither to be acquired or communi- 

 cated. The judgment in all instances, if properly cultivated, ripens 

 and matures; habits of thought, even in ordinary minds, make them 

 capable of drawing accurate conclusions from given premises, and of 

 correctly analyzing what is only perceived. Moreover, the judgment 

 owes its highest efficiency to the imagination. The two faculties may 

 be said to rise together ; the latter sustaining and being guided by 

 the former; if there were no buoyant impulse to raise it, judgment 

 would sleep itself away in the performance of those ordinary duties 

 of existence, which it is well known tend rather to debase than to 

 improve the mind. Memory also may, it is said, be acquired and 

 assisted by practice, in a way that shows it not to be a primitive 

 feature of the human mind ; but imagination cannot be. If a nega- 

 tive argument be allowed, let us enquire what mankind would be 

 without this faculty ? Its influence is unquestioned. Was there no 

 invention, there would be no improvement. If conception was 

 limited by the objects daily and hourly presenting themselves, and 

 nothing were practised but what had obtained a tried experience, 

 there would be nothing new in discovery or theory, and a mental 

 stagnation must follow. What but the consciousness of his own 

 wondrous powers supplied him by an ever active imagination, could 

 have prompted the author of " Paradise Lost" to a subject far above 

 all human creation, deriving no assistance nor inspiration from 

 human feelings or the influence of human affections; a subject in 

 fact, from which, if left alone to act, the judgment, in its strongest 

 hour, must have shrunk dazzled and bewildered ! Imagination then 

 is the day-spring of every improvement in the wide realms of beauty 

 and of use. Without it, much that is noble in human nature, much 

 that harmonizes, refines, and sublimates, that gives to patriotism a 

 glow, and to affection a charm, that imparts sublimity to religion, 

 sanctity to virtue, and purity to thought, would be lost for ever! 

 Without it, dull reality would make the loveliest objects of creation 

 nothing more than the most ordinary ; observance would be bounded 

 and soon satiated ; experience would rise like a phantasm in every 

 corner of the visible world, to mock the eye and check the desires 

 of knowledge, while the successive generations of mankind would 

 live and perish without leaving any further traces behind them, or 

 displaying any other modifications of divine intellect, than the brute 

 creation itself. 



" The imagination of a boy," said John Keats, whose poems we 

 purpose examining, " is healthy, and the mature imagination of a 

 man is healthy, but there is a space of life between, when the soul is 

 in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the 

 ambition thick-sighted." This observation is strictly correct. It has 

 been remarked, that even children display the imaginative powers, 



