"The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy."
Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some one characteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the "nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying or abstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress. The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture, presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thus satisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mind takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset,
"At one stride comes the dark,"
or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise,
"O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire."
Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts that a sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dim region through which the poet feels his way before he comes to the conscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those words into beautiful rhythmical designs.
CHAPTER IV
THE POET'S WORDS
"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication."
JOHN LOCKE, Human Understanding, 3, 2, 1.
"As conceptions are the images of things to the mind within itself, so
are words or names the marks of those conceptions to the minds of them
we converse with."
SOUTH, quoted in Johnson's Dictionary.