rter. His nymphs will have no taste of their
woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or
frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings;
he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of
wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob's Dream. His
Bacchuses will never remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury,
as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females
to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical; his gnomes not 'of the
earth, earthy'. And this again will be wanting to Nature; for it will
be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working
in a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, even for
imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,
dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited,
and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty,
in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain
nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea
that such only could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with faces of
knotted oak; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs
could exist between the earth's atmosphere and the empyrean. The
Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more
imaginative; for it enables us to imagine _beyond_ imagination, and to
bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of
sympathy,--the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a
superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the
beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest
capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful
women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the
ocean's natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human
attendants; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because
be represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they
did the fairer.

To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of
all narrative writers two passages;--one exemplifying the imagination
which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without
confounding them; the other, that which paints events and
circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has
long absented himself from the conflict between his countrymen and the
Trojans, has had a message from heaven b