PASSION, AND IMAGINATION IN POETRY 733 



know beforehand what it will suggest to a poet. It may be, as it was 

 to Chaucer, a crowned queen : 



A fret of gold she hadde next her hair, 

 And upon that a white corown she bare 

 With llourouns smalle, and (1 shall not lie) 

 For all the world right as a daisy 

 Ycrowned is with white loaves light. 

 So were the liourouns of her corown white. 



How utterly dill'erent from this is the feeling of Burns ! To him the 

 daisy is the type of humble cheerfulness, sweet neighbor and meet 

 companion of the humble and cheerful lark. How different, again, 

 was that feeling it inspired in Wordsworth ! The point to strike 

 home to him was the touch of kinship between the simplest flower and 

 man in the fact- that both are alive : 



S \veet silent creature 

 That brcathest with me in sun and air. 



Imagination, used in this restricted sense of the interpretation of 

 phenomena by comparison, is often contrasted with a weaker form 

 of itself to which the name of Fancy is given. The distinction was 

 introduced into these islands by Coleridge, who endeavored to teach 

 it to Wordsworth ; it was then popularized by Leigh Hunt and after- 

 wards by liiiskin. It has played in the last half century so prominent 

 a part in the criticism of poetry, that it is perhaps worth while to 

 look it for once fairly in the face. Coleridge was always promising to 

 give a disquisition upon Poetical Imagination but he never kept his 

 word: he did, however, what was almost better; in the " Biographia 

 Literaria "' he illustrated his meaning from some passages in his 

 friend's poems; and we gather from his comments that he did 

 not at all mean Imagination to be distinguished from Fancy as the 

 {ten-option of deeper from that of more superficial resemblance-^ ; he 

 wished the term Fancy to be kept for the u=e of poetical imagery of 

 all kinds, and the term Imagination to be used of the poet's faculty as 

 a creative artist. Tie speaks of it as a unifying power, bringing to- 

 gether whatever will help his purpose, and rejecting all that is im- 

 pertinent and unessential, lie speak- of it also as a vivifving power, 

 turning "'bodies to spirits by sublimation strange.' 5 That is to say 

 lie use:- Imagination not c o much i>f a qualitv of the poet's mind as 

 of an artistic power which he exercises, the power of imposing 

 living form upon dead matter. he calls it in the '' Ode to Dejection " 

 ''my xJiaphig spirit of imagination:' - but it is not hard to see that 

 this unifying and vitalizing power depends upon what is the charac- 

 teristic essence of imagination, the unanalysable power of serin < T things 



O 



freshlv and in new and harmonious association?. The idea must pre- 



