did nothing but what we do every day in common
discourse. When I wrote this last sentence, and used the words _every
day_ and _common discourse_, I had no images in my mind of any
succession of time; nor of men in conference with each other; nor do I
imagine that the reader will have any such ideas on reading it. Neither
when I spoke of red, or blue, and green, as well as refrangibility, had
I these several colors, or the rays of light passing into a different
medium, and there diverted from their course, painted before me in the
way of images. I know very well that the mind possesses a faculty of
raising such images at pleasure; but then an act of the will is
necessary to this; and in ordinary conversation or reading it is very
rarely that any image at all is excited in the mind. If I say, "I shall
go to Italy next summer," I am well understood. Yet I believe nobody has
by this painted in his imagination the exact figure of the speaker
passing by land or by water, or both; sometimes on horseback, sometimes
in a carriage: with all the particulars of the journey. Still less has
he any idea of Italy, the country to which I proposed to go; or of the
greenness of the fields, the ripening of the fruits, and the warmth of
the air, with the change to this from a different season, which are the
ideas for which the word _summer_ is substituted; but least of all has
he any image from the word _next_; for this word stands for the idea of
many summers, with the exclusion of all but one: and surely the man who
says _next summer_ has no images of such a succession, and such an
exclusion. In short, it is not only of those ideas which are commonly
called abstract, and of which no image at all can be formed, but even of
particular, real beings, that we converse without having any idea of
them excited in the imagination; as will certainly appear on a diligent
examination of our own minds. Indeed, so little does poetry depend for
its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced
it would lose a very considerable part of its energy, if this were the
necessary result of all description. Because that union of affecting
words, which is the most powerful of all poetical instruments, would
frequently lose its force along with its propriety and consistency, if
the sensible images were always excited. There is not, perhaps, in the
whole AEneid a more grand and labored passage than the description of
Vulcan's cavern in Etna, an