button to main menu  Gents Mag 1842 part 1 p.6
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Gentleman's Magazine 1842 part 1 p.6

And yet these porters (i.e. the senses), which all things admit,
Themselves percieve not, nor discern the things;
One common power doth in the forehead sit,
Which all their proper forms together brings.

For all these nerves, which spirits of sense do bear,
And to those outward organs spreading so,
United are, as in a centre, there;
And there this pow'r those sundry forms doth know.

Those outward organs present things receive,
This inward sense doth absent things retain;
Yet straight transmits all fomrs she doth receive
Unto an highier region of the brain."
Such is described to be the province of that common power, that inward sense, to which the Author assigns the name of IMAGINATION only, or Common Sense. And that higher region of the brain, to which she transmits "all forms she doth preceive," is then described to be the IBI,

"Where Fantasy, near handmaid to the mind,
Sits and beholds, and doth discern them all;
Compounds in one, things different in their kind,
Compares the black and white, the great and small.

Besides, those single forms she doth esteem,
And in her balance doth their values try,
Where some things good, and some things ill do seem,
And neutral some, in her fantastic eye.

This busy pow'r is working day and night;
For when the outward senses rest do take,
A thousand dreams, fantastical and light,
With fluttering wings do keep her still awake.
In a following stanza, of a section entitled Sensitive Memory, it is said of this Fantasy,

"Yet always all may not afore her be,
Successively she this and that intends;
Therefore such forms as she doth come to see
To Memory's large volume she commends."
And of WIT, the looking-glass of Fantasy, our Author writes -

"The Wit, the pupil of the soul's clear eye,
And in Man's world the only shining star,
Looks in the mirror of the fantasy,
Where all the gath'rings of the senses are."
The Poet of Paradise has his distinctions likewise, which our readers must compare for themselves with that of Davies, and those of the middle ages,

--- "But know, that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties, that serve
Reason as chief; among these, FANCY next
Her office holds; of all external things
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms imaginations, aery shapes,
Which Reason, joining or disjoining, frames
All that we affirm, or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion: then retires
Into her private cell. When Nature rests
Oft in her absence mimic Fancy wakes
To imitate her; but misjoining shapes
Wild work produces oft, but most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late."
Paradise Lost, b.5.
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