but bide calmly the time when their artificial archetypes shall appear, and the "wisdom" in them shall be "justified" in these its children! So, according to Plato, comparing great to small things, there lay in the Divine mind the archetypes of all that was to be created, with this important difference, that they lay in God spiritually and consciously. How poetical and how solemn to approach, under the guidance of this thought, and gaze on the mind of God as on an ancient awful mirror; and even as in a clear lake we behold the forms of the surrounding scenery reflected from the white strip of pebbled shore up to the gray scalp of the mountain summit, and tremble as we look down on the "skies of a far nether world," on an inverted sun, and on snow unmelted amidst the water; so to see the entire history of man, from the first glance of life in the eye of Adam, down to the last sparkle of the last ember of the general conflagration, lying silently and inverted there—how sublime, but at the same time how bewildering and how appalling! Our readers will find, in the "Pleasures of Imagination," an expansion—perhaps they may think it a dilution—of this Platonic idea.
They will find there, too, the germ of the famous theory of Alison and Jeffrey about Beauty. These theorists held 'that beauty resides not so much in the object as in the mind; that we receive but what we give; that our own soul is the urn whence beauty is showered over the universe; that flower and star are lovely because the mind has breathed on them; that the imagination and the heart of man are the twin beautifiers of creation; that the dwelling of beauty is not in the light of setting suns, nor in the beams of morning stars, nor in the waves of summer seas, but in the human spirit; that sublimity tabernacles not in the palaces of the thunder, walks not on the wings of the wind, rides not on the forked lightning, but that it is the soul which is lifted up there; that it is the soul which, in its high aspirings,'
"Yokes with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
and scatters grandeur around it on its way."
All this seems anticipated, and, as it were, coiled up in the words of our poet:—
"Mind, mind alone (bear witness earth and heaven!)
The living fountains in itself contains
Of beauteous and sublime."
That Akenside was a real poet many expressions in his "Pleasures of
Imagination" prove, such as that just quoted—
"Yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast
Sweeps the long tract of day;"
but, taking his poem as a whole, it is rather a tissue of eloquence and philosophical declamation than of imagination. He deals rather in sheet lightning than in forked flashes. As a didactic poem it has a high, but not the highest place. It must not be named beside the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius, or the "Georgics" of Virgil, or the "Night Thoughts" of Young; and in poetry, yields even to the "Queen Mab" of Shelley. It ranks high, however, amongst that fine class of works which have called themselves, by no misnomer, "Pleasures;" and to recount all the names of which were to give an "enumeration of sweets" as delightful as that in "Don Juan." How cheering to think of that beautiful bead-roll—of which the "Pleasures of Memory," "Pleasures of Hope," "Pleasures of Melancholy," "Pleasures of Imagination," are only a few! We may class, too, with them, Addison's essays on the "Pleasures of Imagination" in The Spectator, which, although in prose, glow throughout with the mildest and truest spirit of poetry; and if inferior to Akenside in richness and swelling pomp of words, and in dashing rhetorical force, far excel him in clearness, in chastened beauty, and in those inimitable touches and unconscious felicities of thought and expression which drop down, like ripe apples falling suddenly across your path from a laden bough, and which could only have proceeded from Addison's exquisite genius.