ch he
thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer,

_Sleeping against the sun upon a day,_

when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser,
softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves
against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare's Ariel, living under
blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat; and his domestic namesake
in the _Rape of the Lock_ (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving
a lady's petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing
atoms of snuff into a coxcomb's nose. In the _Orlando Furioso_ (Canto
xv, st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at
being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and
picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair,
sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and
ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay
grand, in Ariosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its
conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his
head,--a single hair,--which must be taken from it before he can be
killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that
proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on
horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with
it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover
such a needle in such a bottle of hay? The trunk is spurring after him
to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At
length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so; and the
moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, _the face of
the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets_, and the
lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.

Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;
The eyes turn'd in their sockets, drearily;
And all things show'd the villain's sun was set.
His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,
And giving the last shudder, was a corse.

It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he
goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the
words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It
is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize weakly or
mistakenly in that region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting
to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of
imagination from that qua