What shall be shall be, tho’ the great earth fall,
They take no heed of man or man’s deserving,
Reck not what happy lives they make or mar,
Work out their fatal will unswerv’d, unswerving,
And know not that they are!
[223] Fragment de l’Art de jouir, quoted by P.-M. Masson in La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau, II, 228.
[224] If nature merely reflects back to a man his own image, it follows that Coleridge’s celebrated distinction between fancy and imagination has little value, inasmuch as he rests his proof of the unifying power of the imagination, in itself a sound idea, on the union the imagination effects between man and outer nature—and this union is on his own showing fanciful.
[225] If I had had this consecration Wordsworth says, addressing Peele Castle,
I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,
Amid a world how different from this!