This freshness, however, is not to be taken for an infallible sign of [§ 7. Distinction between imagination and fancy.]imagination, inasmuch as it results also from a vivid operation of fancy, whose parallel function to this division of the imaginative faculty it is here necessary to distinguish.
I believe it will be found that the entirely unimaginative mind sees nothing of the object it has to dwell upon or describe, and is therefore utterly unable, as it is blind itself, to set anything before the eyes of the reader.[[56]]
The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail.[[57]]
The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, in its giving of outer detail.
Take an instance. A writer with neither imagination nor fancy, describing a fair lip, does not see it, but thinks about it, and about what is said of it, and calls it well-turned, or rosy, or delicate, or lovely, or afflicts us with some other quenching and chilling epithet. Now hear fancy speak,—
"Her lips were red, and one was thin,
Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly."[[58]]
The real, red, bright being of the lip is there in a moment But it is all outside; no expression yet, no mind. Let us go a step farther with Warner, of fair Rosamond struck by Eleanor.
"With that she dashed her on the lips
So dyed double red;
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled."
The tenderness of mind begins to mingle with the outside color, the imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shelley,—
"Lamp of life, thy lips are burning
Through the veil that seems to hide them,
As the radiant lines of morning
Through thin clouds, ere they divide them."