AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 179 



and images."* This has not escaped the penetration of Shake- 

 speare : 



" Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 



Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 



More than cool reason ever comprehends. 



The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, 



Are of imagination all compact : 



One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold ; 



This is the madman : the lover, all as frantic, 



Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. 



The poet's eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling, 



Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; 



And, as imagination bodies forth 



The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 



Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing 



A local habitation, and a name." 



Two writers of great reputation, Addison and Akenside, have 

 composed set treatises on the pleasures of imagination; but no 

 writer has, as yet, depicted its pains. The ideas which these 

 authors attached to that function of the mind termed the imagina- 

 tion, w^ere, in some measure, different from the definition which I 

 have given of it. The pleasures of imagination were, in the opi- 

 nion of Addison, those furnished by the sense of vision, and were 

 evidently pleasures of sense, and not of imagination. " "By the plea- 

 sures of imagination, or fancy," says this Essayist, " I here mean 

 such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actu- 

 ally in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by- 

 paintings, statues, or descriptions. We cannot, indeed, have a 

 single image in the fancy, that did not make its first entrance 

 through the sight.'' In the first acception of the term, as used by 

 Addison, the pleasures or pains -which arise from visible objects 

 before the eyes, are strictly those of sense : when furnished to the 

 mind by description or painting, by word or idea, if they are 

 attended by precisely the same circumstances which attended them 

 in their presentation to the mind in a visible state, memory only 

 is concerned, the object is recalled in its true and real character or 



* Burton, Anatomy of MelancJiohj, 



n2 



