button to main menu  Gents Mag 1842 part 1 p.15

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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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