us fold,
_And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air._

_Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.

That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong
beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.

Oh!--and I forsooth
In love! I that have been love's whip I
_A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_
A domineering pedant o'er the boy,--
This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
_Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.

_Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.

That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected,
or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and
having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its
smiling subjector.

Silent icicles
_Quietly shining to the quiet moon._

Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.

That, again, is imagination;--analogical sympathy; and exquisite of
its kind it is.

'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_;
where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_,
unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'

_Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.

And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and
but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to
it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the 'Dutchman's
beard' is made to represent the lady!

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the
comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full
of imagination: the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Rape of the
Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie
Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly
identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be
found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It
presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of 'images' in the
sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other
hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition
([Greek: Phantasma], appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom
from visibility which is one of the highest privileges