TALBOYS.

If those ancient poets in whom this mythology remains, are to be received sometimes as delivering known and accepted names as beings, sometimes as supplying from their momentary inventions unreceived names, then this view of the case also affords proof of the same disposition we have spoken of. It shows the disposition of men to believe in powers the immediate causes of impressive effects; and the Poet must be conceived as suggesting and delivering the shape and name of Powers which it is already believed must be, though themselves are not known—not as inventing them deliberately and ornamentally, nor as declaring them from an assured and assumed knowledge. This disposition to produce shapes of powers which in early ages is attended with positive belief, afterwards remains in imagination—art, though not extinct in the work of our mind for dealing in realities. Do we, sir, ever divest ourselves of a belief in Death, Chance, Fate, Time? But a strong belief overrules with us all such illusions of fancy, withdrawing all power to the great source of power. Therefore, such a disposition, though it continues, is in real thought much oppressed and stifled, and shows itself almost accidentally, as it were, rather than in any constant opinion, for in deliberate opinion it cannot hold. But in Poetry, even in Eloquence, it remains. There we allow ourselves in illusion; and the mind leaps up with a sort of rejoicing, to recover its old liberty of deceiving itself with splendid fictions.

SEWARD.

Which is again an instance of the two different forms in which Imagination is seen in the earlier and later age—in the first, realised in belief—in the last, having its domain in the avowedly ideal world of Poetry.

NORTH.

I confess, my dear friends, it appears to me not easy to explain how the mind is enabled, desire it as much as it will, to pour its own capacities into insensate things. When Lear says, “Nature, hear! dear Goddess, hear!” his passion will not believe but that there is a hearer and executor of its curse; and it imagines nature capable of hearing. “If prayers can pierce the clouds and enter heaven, why then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses.” Does not all Passion that addresses itself to inanimate objects throw into them a feeling? Would not the Invocation be idle to the unresponsive and unhearing? This, then, is the nature of human passion, that, when vehement, it cannot conceive that its will is not to be fulfilled. If there are no adequate ministers, inadequate ministers must take their place. Inanimate things must become agents. “Rise, rise, ye wild tempests, and cover his flight.”—“Strike her young bones, ye taking airs, with lameness.” This is one demand, then, of passion, the execution of its purposes. Another demand of passion is sympathy. This, we know, is one of its first and strongest demands. If, then, men will not, or are not present to sympathise, that which surrounds must. The boiling passion finds it easier to believe that winds and rocks feel with it, than that it is sole, and cut off from all participation. Hence the more exuberant passion animates things, our own gladness animates nature.

SEWARD.

And how well has Adam Smith said how our sympathy includes the dead! Of all that feel not, it may with the readiest illusion embrace those who once felt; and what do we know that they do not yet feel? Now, if this can be granted as the nature and power of passion, that, without any better ground than its own uncontrollable efflux, it can blend itself into that which is around it—that it believes lightnings and floods will destroy, merely from the intensity of will with which it wills them to destroy—though here the fitness for destruction is a reason; but if it imagines that, undestroying, they will rise to destroy, that peace shall be converted into danger, and sleep into anguish, that food shall not nourish, and winds shall not waft, rather than it shall be left without vengeance, or baffled; then may we say that there is in Passion an absolute power of carrying itself out into other existence, and that no other condition, in such existence, is necessary, save that it shall become obviam to passion in its mood. If so, then, of course, any reason from analogy or causation becomes a very potent one to attract such passion and opinions formed by passion. Let this be established in passion at its fiercest, wildest height, and the principle is obtained. It is then the disposition of the mind under emotion to diffuse its emotion, bending the things around to suit its purposes, or at least filling them with sympathy with itself. In either case, upon this reason, that only so can the will which rises with its emotion ever be satisfied. This principle given, strongest in strongest passion, but accompanying all emotion, is the root of Impersonation. All intellectual analogies, all coincidences of reality with the demands of emotion, will quicken and facilitate this act of the mind; but neither analogies nor coincidences, nor any other inclining reasons, are requisite. The emotion will reconcile and assimilate any object to itself, if it is reduced to them. Here then is a principle sufficient to animate all nature, all being, and to any extent or height. This seems to be the foundation of Impersonation—that it is the nature of man to fill all things with himself. It is plainly a radix for all poetical Impersonation. He makes and reads everywhere reflection of mind; he does this without passion, that is, not without feeling—for in all ordinary thought there is feeling—but without transported passion. His strong passions in their transport show us in plainer evidence how he involves all things with himself, and subjects all things to himself; and his gentler feelings do the same. He is almost the cause of a world of mind revolving round and upon himself—he makes himself such a centre; this is the constant temper and the habitual mode of conceiving and hearing of all minds.

TALBOYS.

We seem, sir, to be talking of Imagination?