Many of my poems have been influenced by my own circumstances when I was writing them. 'The Warning' was composed on horseback, while I was riding from Moresby in a snow-storm. Hence the simile in that poem,
'While thoughts press on and feelings overflow,
And quick words round him fall like flakes of snow.'
In the 'Ecclesiastical Sonnets,' the lines concerning the Monk (Sonnet xxi.),
'Within his cell.
Round the decaying trunk of human pride.
At morn, and eve, and midnight's silent hour,
Do penitential cogitations cling:
Like ivy round some ancient elm they twine
In grisly folds and strictures serpentine;
Yet while they strangle, a fair growth they bring
For recompence—their own perennial bower;'—
were suggested to me by a beautiful tree clad as thus described, which you may remember in Lady Fleming's park at Rydal, near the path to the upper waterfall.
S——, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds imagery and imagination. Sensible objects really existing, and felt to exist, are imagery; and they may form the materials of a descriptive poem, where objects are delineated as they are. Imagination is a subjective term: it deals with objects not as they are, but as they appear to the mind of the poet.
The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified both in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of dramatic tableaux, by which the persons of the play are invested with new drapery, or placed in new attitudes; or it is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together into one harmonious and homogeneous whole.
A beautiful instance of the modifying and investive power of imagination may be seen in that noble passage of Dyer's 'Ruins of Rome,'[261] where the poet hears the voice of Time; and in Thomson's description of the streets of Cairo, expecting the arrival of the caravan which had perished in the storm,[262]
Read all Cowley; he is very valuable to a collector of English sound sense.... Burns's 'Scots wha hae' is poor as a lyric composition.
Ariosto and Tasso are very absurdly depressed in order to elevate Dante. Ariosto is not always sincere; Spenser always so.