That is imagination;—the strong mind sympathizing with the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.
Oh!—and I forsooth
In love! I that have been love’s whip I
A very beadle to a humorous sigh!—
A domineering pedant o’er the boy,—
This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, &c.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act iii, sc. 1.
That is fancy;—a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector.
Silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight.
That, again, is imagination;—analogical sympathy; and exquisite of its kind it is.
‘You are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.’
Twelfth Night, Act iii, sc. 2.
And that is fancy;—one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker’s animal spirits, the ‘Dutchman’s beard’ is made to represent the lady!
Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: the Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy: Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest, the Faerie Queene, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;—of ‘images’ in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (Φαντασμα, appearance, phantom), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination. Viola, in Twelfth Night, speaking of some beautiful music, says:
It gives a very echo to the seat
Where Love is throned.