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himsell to unravel what it was, and what it signified. Thus he arrived 

 at his doctrine of the Imagination, and the essential distinction between 

 it and Fancy. To make much of these subtle psychological inquiries, 

 would only mystify and weary you. The Imagination, in brief, was 

 denied to be the maker of images; and Imagination was the proper 

 organ of poetry. So was overturned the current criticism, which 

 believed poetry to consist in the use of eloquent or sublime metaphors 

 and similes. He tells us how he was impelled to answer the question — 

 What is Poetry? by his strong feeling of Wordsworth being so real a 

 poet ; and yet of his being so entirely free from what had usually been 

 considered the marks of one. He arrived at the conclusion by this 

 process — that true poetry deals with the world of sense and its manifold 

 contents, only so far as they are symbols of corresponding realities in 

 the world of spirit. The first work of the Imagination is to read the 

 symbolic language of nature. This is the proper sphere in which Imagin- 

 ation moves ; and the poet, possessing this gift above other men, sees 

 every object more truly and completely than is possible to the unimagin- 

 ative eye ; and paints nature, not absolutely, but as contemplated by 

 man ; a being who belongs to both worlds at once, and is capable of 

 beholding glimpses of the one reflected from the unconscious face of the 

 other. With two or three vivid strokes, e.g. in some of his o^vn poems, 

 a scene flashes entire into his reader's imagination, where others with less 

 intensity would have laboured long in creating the same impression. 

 "The Imagination dissolves," he says, "diffuses, dissipates, in order to 

 re-create ; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all 

 events, it struggles to idealize and unify ; it is essentially vital, even as 

 all objects are essentially fixed and dead." The Fancy he dismisses in 

 a few words. "It is indeed," he says, "no other than a mode of memory, 

 emancipated from the order of time and space, blended with and modified 

 by choice." Let me give you two or three passages of his own, which 

 serve to show that he possessed these gifts in no ordinary measure : — 

 " Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 



'Twas sad as sad could be ; 

 And we did speak, only to break 



The silence of the sea ! 



