ion, some of them
necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them
possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as
follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or
circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a
sword, or looking out of a window;--Second, that which presents real,
but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves,
or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;--Third,
that which combines character and events directly imitated from real
life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable
parts of the histories of Priam and _Macbeth_, or what may be called
natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;--Fourth, that
which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as
Homer's gods, and Shakespeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears,
Ariosto's hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate
or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as
when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the
coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a
word, as in Milton's 'motes that _people_ the sunbeams'; sometimes in
concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing,
past or even future, as in the 'starry Galileo' of Byron, and that
ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet 'murdered' applied to the
yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio,--

So the two brothers and their _murder'd_ man
Rode towards fair Florence;--

sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which
makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly
winding its '_sultry_ horn', which epithet contains the heat of a
summer's day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a
variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with
jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine;
as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and
the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the
Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking
of love--

Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno,
_E d'amor ragionasse quella riva!_

_Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii.

or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very
light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own b