of
imagination. Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful
music, says:

It gives a very echo to the seat
Where Love is throned.

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the
fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a
solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the
passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all.
Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of
what is called Imagination.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy,
as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is
busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.
Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a
telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and
sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the
child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister
takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of
gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and
capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings
to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with
smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together,
and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not
incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her
company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of
less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great
imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also,
the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the
strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer,
Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope
has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy;
Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone,
of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal
perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania
scenes from the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_] will be found in the
present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and
her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:
Her traces of the smallest spider's web;
Her c