In comparison with the following:

"What envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east!

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."

In both passages there seems to be equal lack of dignity in the imagery. Taken separately, out of their connection, postillion, coachman, dress, liveries, etc., are certainly as good as lace and burned out candles, and a man standing on tiptoe; yet the former is a cold conceit, and the latter one of the most striking and suggestive pictures that could be drawn in the same number of words.

Yet I would not be understood as intending to laud one degree of impersonation at the expense of another. Extreme cases best answer the purpose of marking distinctions; but every example must not be assumed as equally cold and uninteresting. We could ill spare from the kingdom of art the brilliant creations of fancy, and there are many unnamed degrees between the cold conceit and the life breathing personification. The more comprehensive is generally found to embrace the other. The best examples of both can be drawn from the productions of the same mind. Thus, the following is an offspring of pure fancy, elegant as frost work.

"O, then I see queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.

Her wagon spokes made of long spinner's legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams.
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small gray coated gnat,
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,

Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,

Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers."

For the purpose of comparison with this, I select, from the same author, another passage, consisting of images not more intimately associated with human feeling in their own nature:

"Come on, sir, here's the place. Stand still. How fearful

And giddy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce as gross as beetles. Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers samphire. Dreadful trade.
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach

Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy,

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes

Can not be heard so high."

Here the imagery is so woven together as to move the very feeling which an observer of the reality would experience, until the reader is ready to exclaim, with the character personated:

It is by the hand of fancy that images taken from the external world are employed to the expression of ideas without any touch of emotion; imagination is the power of imbuing all with a healthy human interest.

The distinction is one of degree and combination, and may not be recognized by metaphysics, nor necessary to the understanding of the radical operations of intellect, but is indispensable to true appreciation of the most important element in art. For the faculty of conferring upon inanimate material the utterance of human feeling is the profoundest source of sympathy between the artist and those whom he addresses. It is the secret of poetical interest, which arises mainly from our sympathy with other beings of our race. Why do we read the works of Cowley and other poets of his class with so much languor? They have imagery in abundance. They overflow with it; yet fail to interest the reader, or even to detain his attention long. It is a labor to peruse them for a few minutes. And why do the dreams of John Bunyan, with no pretension to reality, take such hold upon the mind as to withdraw it entirely from external things, abstracting attention from the information of the senses to engross it all for themselves; while the works of many a learned historian, deep in the most important transactions of the real world, are a laborious study. Or why has their allegorical meaning an interest not to be found in more learned and thorough theological works?

Or why does the oratory of one man create a breathless silence throughout the assembly, which hangs with the most eager attention upon his words, while another might say almost the same things and scarcely obtain a hearing? What, in short, is the difference between accurate dullness and that composition, which, with no higher degree of artistic skill, and on the same subject, absorbs the whole man of the reader, and leads his feelings captive in its chains?

It is impossible to answer such questions satisfactorily without regard to the distinction now made. For all such effects are the productions of imagination in that respect in which it is different from fancy.

The grandest, the most beautiful objects in nature, as material in the hands of an artist, are but tame and commonplace, unless he can inspire them with the glow of human emotion. Man can be truly and deeply interested only in what pertains to man. We must bring the lofty down to ourselves, as well as lift the lowly up, if we would truly sympathize with either. Even the student of science, who believes that he loves the rocks or plants of his classification, will find, upon closer observation, that it is only because he has associated with them, and, by an act of imagination, imputed to them, qualities of his own mind, and the accomplishment of his own plans. It is this association with the feelings of humanity which gives all its highest interest to the physical world. Are the natural features of the scenes they describe the principal source

of interest in the writings of Thompson and of Wordsworth? Their favorite subjects, as far as concerns bodily shape, have always been open to every man with eyes and ears in his head-subjects attempted repeatedly by other pens not failing either in accuracy or command of language. Its connection with human life is all that lends this material earth its power to move the feelings of man. We may admire the beautiful and wonder at the grand; but removed from the feelings of our race, they make but a short lived impression. With what different interest would we look upon the plains of Attica, and the wilds of New Holland, upon the site of ancient Thebes and the waste which bears no trace of man ? Even in the primeval forests of the West the pulse is quickened by the thought that the Indian savage has wandered there; but the interest amounts to rapture when some ancient mound or fragment of a wall brings up our fellow man before us. The discoveries in central America and Yucatan, of ruined temples and cities of a former time, have excited more interest in the world than all the strangest stories ever penned, of vast territories of savage grandeur unmarked by the foot of man. Amid the solitude of the far western prairies, where least of all are suggestions of human life to be expected, what are the images that rise before the mind of the poet ?

"Are they here

The dead of other days?—and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life