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Gentleman's Magazine 1842 part 1 p.15
[dissolv]ing and separating unity into number." And this is
illustrated by the fleet descried far off - sailing compact
as one person; then the merchants representing this unity
separated into number: and then again, the comparison of the
flying fiend to the ships re-combined in a body. These are
indeed all images brought into juxta position by
Imagination.
The POET forbears to consider "the Imagination as it deals
with thoughts and sentiments, as it regulates the
composition of characters, and determines the course of
action:" and in our own observations we have used the same
forbearance. He distinguishes enthusiastic and meditative
Imagination, or poetical, from human and dramatic; a
subdivision of powers capable of subdivisions, to which it
would be difficult to prescribe an end. The Scriptures,
Milton, and also Spenser, are the store-houses of the
former, and Shakespeare of the latter.
Spenser, - as at one time incited to the allegorical spirit,
"to create persons out of abstractions," i.e. to
impersonate; and still impersonating, "to give - as in the
character of Una - the universality and permanence of
abstractions, by means of attributes and emblems that belong
to the highest moral truths and purest sensations."
The exclamation of Lear, quoted as an illustration of human
or dramatic imagination, is an impersonation of the boldest
and yet simplest character:
"I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdoms, called you daughters."
To Mr. Taylor's definition of Fancy, by which it
characterised as the power of evoking and combining, the
POET objects, and very justly objects, that it is too
general. "To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to
combine, belong as well to the Imagiination as to the
Fancy." It is the same objection that may be urged against
the language in which the two are discriminated by the POET:
it is too general, the qualities ascribed are too
super-essential, if we may borrow a scholastic term, for
use, or even common comprehension. Our POET is indeed
himself aware that there are times and occasions when "Fancy
ambitiously aims at a rivalship with Imagination, and
Imagination stoops to work with the materials of Fancy."
It is now time to have done with the Preface, and to proceed
to the Poems. And the first thing that strikes us is their
titles - brute animals, of earth, air or sea; inanimate
objects, from the towering oak to the lowly daisy, from the
mountain to the grain of sand, - have been the common
resource of the fabulist, from antient AEsop to our own Gay:
and our author himself, when about to find employment for
his fancy, immediately resorts to this exhaustless Treasury.
All these small productions it is our intention to pass; and
after one short extract from the Song at the Feast of
Brougham Castle; in which - though allotted to Imagination -
Fancy seems to have intruded herself; we shall conclude with
some quotations from the longest poem, under the same head
of Imagination, in which also Fancy is repeatedly guilty of
taking the pen out of the hand of Imagination and guiding it
herself.
From Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle:-
"He knew the rocks which Angels haunt,
Upon the mountains visitant;
He hath kenn'd them taking wing;
And into caves where Faeries sing
He hath entered; and been told
By voices how men lived of old."
In the exquisite Poem, On the Power of Sound, Fancy
commences her
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