180 ON THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN MENTAL 



stace; and it is only when the properties of an object, as its 

 colour, form, and size, are changed, or the component parts of a 

 scene, or multiplicity of objects are presented to the mind in a diffe- 

 rent series or manner to that which they actually possess in nature, 

 that the imagination, strictly speaking, is called into play. 



This is plainly the real meaning of the term, and that mental 

 operation which the word is intended to represent. And in this 

 sense has it been used by Shakspeare (than whom no i)oet ever 

 possessed it in a more eminent degree), in the passage from The 

 Midsummer Night's Dream, before quoted. It is manifest that the 

 imagination of his lunatic, his lover, and his poet, consisted in pic- 

 tures, or combinations of events, which had no real existence. 

 Thus, the madman saw more devils than vast hell could hold. 

 This was no fancy on the part of the poet, but a mere descrip- 

 tion of the state of the lunatic, or hypochondriac, as it existed 

 in nature. And, for illustrations of this, I refer to the case of 

 Nicolai, the Prussian bookseller, who fancied his room teeming 

 with human spectres; and, also, to the case of the young noble- 

 man (detailed by Sir Walter Scott, in his Letters on Demonology 

 and Witchcraft), whose imagination daily peopled his dining-room 

 with a band of attendant spirits. 



I advance these cases, not for the pui*pose of shewing that these 

 freaks of the imagination were dependant, as they evidently were, 

 upon derangement of the bodily health, but to illustrate the ac- 

 tual phenomena of that mental process named Imagination, which, 

 whether exemplified in the sane or the insane, whether acting in 

 our dreams or in our waking hours, is occupied by scenes or visions 

 which have no existence in nature, from the high-colouring which 

 leads the poet to shade the leaf with a brighter green than that 

 which nature's tried and cunning hand laid on, to the terrific vi- 

 sions of the maniac, in the cells of the Senavra, the Bicetre, or 

 Bedlam. 



The most simple exemplification of Imagination is that which 

 leads poets to divest their narratives of the dull reality of truth, and 

 to heighten their descriptions hy an assemblage of beauties which, 

 though existing in a diffusive state, have yet no reality in a state of 

 combination. MiltonV garden of Eden is a familiar example : 



