The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with passionate feeling, idealizes objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is never the dry clear light of noon.
"She was a phantom of delight."
"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens…."
This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of immaterialities.
Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now little inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains true that the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful" resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse. The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative imagination, which may be, after all, only the "fancy" taking a deeper plunge. In the familiar song from The Tempest, for example, we have in the second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty of the last three lines of the stanza,—the lines that are graven upon Shelley's tombstone in Rome:
"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."
So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories, while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. For the deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the imaginative conception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet's contemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in Wordsworth's superb couplet in the "Ode to Duty":
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
fresh and strong."
And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic from whom an instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, was as much perplexed by them as Jeffrey.
6. Lyric Expression