Gents Mag 1842 part 1 p.14
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Gentleman's Magazine 1842 part 1 p.14
The POET proceeds to illustrate his meaning by some very common instances of metaphorical usages of words; and it is our intention to accompany him with a running commentary, to explain and enforce our own notions, as they have been above set forth; and at the same time shew how easily all his instances will accommodate themselves to those notions. "A parrot," says he, hangs from the wire of his cage; a monkey from the bough of a tree. Each creature does so literally and actually." In Virgil, the shepherd sees his goats hang from the rock. In Shakespeare "hangs one who gathers samphire." According to our interpretation, both the latter are in such positions as to seem to require that, or a similar support, from above, which the two former possess, to prevent their fall. Again, in Milton: "Far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds;" that is, from its distance, we are unable to discern the sustaining waters, upon which, says the POET, "we know and feel it pursues its track;" and it seems therefore to require, and from the apparent proximity and substantiality of the clouds, it seems to posses, a support from above: and it is the imagination, according to our POET, which suggests and supplies it. So far as to the impressions of sight. Instances of correspondent nature succeed - of impressions from sound. And then the poet remarks, "Thus far of images independent of each other, and immediately endowed by man with properties that do not inhere in them, upon an incitement from properties and qualities the existence of which is inherent and obvious." The manifest effect of this "endwoment by man with properties not inherent," is to change the identity of the object in view of the mind; to change its personality. From the imagination "acting upon an individual image," we are led "to a consideration of the same faculty employed upon images in a conjunction by which they modify each other." And an example is selected, from our author's own poem, entitled, "Resolution and Independence:" "As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couch'd in the bald top of an eminence; So that it seems a thing endued with sense, Like a sea beast crawled forth, which on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself. Such seem'd this man: not all alive or dead, Nor all asleep, in this extreme old age." The stone is here, by comparison, impersonated into the likeness of a sea beast; and that sea beast is supposed in a place or state, having some affinity to that of the stone, to render the likeness more complete; and the old man is supposed in a similar place and state: "Motionless as a cloud the old man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth altogether when it move at all." Here the cloud is so far imnpersonated as to be endowed with "the property not inherent," a sense of hearing. "Thus far," says the POET , "of an endowing or modifying power - but the imagination also shapes or creates:-" and in no process "does it more delight than that of consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolv- |
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