ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison's Cato is full of them.

Passion unpitied and successless love
Plant daggers in my breast.

I've sounded my Numidians, man by man,
And find them ripe for a revolt.

The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex.

Of the same kind is his "courting the yoke"-" distracting my very heart"-" calling up all" one's "father" in one's soul-— "working every nerve"-" copying a bright example;” in short, the whole play, relieved now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison's time,—the Mariamne of Fenton :—

Mariamne, with superior charms,

Triumphs o'er reason: in her look she bears
A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;
Fair as the first idea beauty prints

In her young lover's soul; a winning grace
Guides every gesture, and obsequious love
Attends on all her steps.

"Triumphing o'er reason" is an old acquaintance of everybody's. "Paradise in her look" is from the Italian poets through Dryden. "Fair as the first idea," &c., is from Milton spoilt ; "winning grace" and "steps" from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt; just as when a great writer borrows, he improves.

To come now to Fancy,—she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagi nation indeed, purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting analogies; the perception of sympa thies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and ith ai and fantastical creations.

Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air.

Troilus and Cressida, Act iii., sc. 3.

That is imagination ;-the strong mind sympathizing with the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dewdrop.

Oh!-and I forsooth

In love! I that have been love's whip!
A very beadle to a humorous sigh!—
A domineering pedant o'er the boy,—

This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,—
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,

The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, &c.

Love's Labor's Lost, Act iii., sc. 1.

That is fancy;—a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector.

Silent icicles

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Coleridge's Frost at Midnight.

That, again, is imagination ;-analogical sympathy; and exquisite of its kind it is.

"You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt."

Twelfth Night, Act iii, sc. 2.

And that is fancy;-one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the "Dutchman's beard" is made to represent the lady!

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy

to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy: Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest, the Fairy Queen, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body ;—of "images" in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (Pavraoua, appearance, phantom), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination. Viola, in Twelfth Night, speaking of some beautiful music, says:—

It gives a very echo to the seat,
Where Love is throned.

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all. Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of what is called Imagi

nation.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not

incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favorite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakspeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing will be found in the present volume. See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in Romeo and Juliet :—

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces of the smallest spider's web;

Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness.

As a small but

pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton's Nymphidia :—

This palace standeth in the air,

By necromancy placed there,
That it no tempest needs to fear,

Which way soe'er it blow it:

And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon,
Whence lies a way up to the moon,
And thence the Fairy can as soon

Pass to the earth below it.

The walls of spiders' legs are made,
Well morticed and finely laid:

He was the master of his trade,

It curiously that builded:
The windows of the eyes of cats:

(because they see best at night)

And for the roof instead of slats
Is cover'd with the skins of bats
With moonshine that are gilded.

Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet's Muse's Elysium.

Of leaves of roses, white and red,
Shall be the covering of the bed;
The curtains, vallens, tester all,
Shall be the flower imperial;
And for the fringe it all along

With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
Of lilies shall the pillows be

With down stuft of the butterfly.

Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John Suckling, in his "Ballad on a Wedding," has given some of the most playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like twinkles in the eye, or cherries bedewed.

Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they fear'd the light;
But oh! she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter day,
Is half so fine a sight.

It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted everybody :

Her lips were red, and one was thin,
Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly.

Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.
With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by
which verse ought to be modulated, and one-ness of impression
diversely produced, it has been contended by some, that Poetry
need not be written in verse at all; that prose is as good a me-
dium, provided poetry be conveyed through it; and that to think
otherwise is to confound letter with spirit, or form with essence.
But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness and unfitness for