TALBOYS.
As amber.
NORTH.
I see in Imagination a power which I can express to my own satisfaction by two terms, of which you, Seward, sometimes look as if you refused me the use, disabling me from defining for you. For myself, I see “Passion moulding or influencing Intellectual Forms.” As the language stands hitherto, I do not see my way of getting out of the two terms. You want, on the lowest steps, a very elementary description—something far below the Poet—something as yet far short of the sublime, the beautiful, and the wonderful. Tell me some one who has felt fear, or anger, or love, or hate—how these have affected for him the objects of simple apprehension or of conception; of sight, for instance—of sound? Has anything through his fear seemed larger—through his hate wickeder, than it is? For that differencing of an object by a passion, I know no name but Imagination. It is the transformation of a reality; that seems to me to be the ground of what we more loftily apprehend under the name Imagination.
The great differences in the different psychological states and facts arising out of the different passions or passionate moments, are various, endless. Such influences from pleasure and pain, from loves of some sort, and from hates of some sort, take effect for us in all the objects with which we have intercourse. They make what it is to us. They make man what he is to us. They are the life of our souls. They are given to all human spirits.
SEWARD.
We have, all of us, clean forgotten Milton.
Scene II.—The Van. Time—Midnight.
North—Talboys—Seward.
NORTH.
May the bond of Unity lying at the heart of the Paradise Lost, be said to be the following Ethical Dogma?