Heavily hanging in the dewy morn.
But compare it with Keats’
Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
The imagination has touched that word “alien,” and in it we see the field through Ruth’s eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, and not through those of the poet.
Imagination enters more or less into the composition of all great minds, all minds that have what we call breadth as distinguished from mere force or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato and Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, in fanatics like George Fox, and in reformers like Luther.
The shape which the imaginative faculty will take is modified by the force of the other qualities with which it is coördinated in the mind. If the moral sense predominates, the man becomes a reformer, or a fanatic, and his imagination gets itself uttered in his life. Bunyan would have been nothing but a fanatic, if he had not been luckily shut up in Bedford jail, alone with his imagination, which, unable to find vent in any other way, possessed and tortured him till it had wrung the “Pilgrim’s Progress” out of him—a book the nearest to a poem, without being one, that ever was written. Uniting itself with the sense of form, Imagination makes a sculptor; with those of form and color, a painter; with those of time and tune, a musician. For in itself it is dumb, and can find expression only through the help of some other faculty.
Imagination plus the poetic sense is poesy, minus the poetic sense it is science, though it may clothe itself in verse. To those who are familiar with Dr. Donne’s verses, I need only mention his name as a proof of my last position. He solves problems in rhyme, that is all.
Shakspeare was so charged with the highest form of the poetic imagination, as some persons are with electricity, that he could not point his finger at a word without a spark of it going out of him. I will illustrate it by an example taken at random from him. When Romeo is parting from Juliet, Shakspeare first projects his own mind into Romeo, and then, as Romeo becomes so possessed with the emotion of the moment that his words take color from it, all nature is infected and is full of partings. He says:
But look what envious streaks