have no Ideas annexed to them, and to make something like
Description in Musick. Yet it is certain, there may be confused,
imperfect Notions of this Nature raised in the Imagination by an
Artificial Composition of Notes; and we find that great Masters in the
Art are able, sometimes, to set their Hearers in the Heat and Hurry of a
Battel, to overcast their Minds with melancholy Scenes and Apprehensions
of Deaths and Funerals, or to lull them into pleasing Dreams of Groves
and Elisiums.

In all these Instances, this Secondary Pleasure of the Imagination
proceeds from that Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas arising
from the Original Objects, with the Ideas we receive from the Statue,
Picture, Description, or Sound that represents them. It is impossible
for us to give the necessary Reason, why this Operation of the Mind is
attended with so much Pleasure, as I have before observed on the same
Occasion; but we find a great Variety of Entertainments derived from
this single Principle: For it is this that not only gives us a Relish of
Statuary, Painting and Description, but makes us delight in all the
Actions and Arts of Mimickry. It is this that makes the several kinds of
Wit Pleasant, which consists, as I have formerly shewn, in the Affinity
of Ideas: And we may add, it is this also that raises the little
Satisfaction we sometimes find in the different Sorts of false Wit;
whether it consists in the Affinity of Letters, as in Anagram,
Acrostick; or of Syllables, as in Doggerel Rhimes, Ecchos; or of Words,
as in Punns, Quibbles; or of a whole Sentence or Poem, to Wings, and
Altars. The final Cause, probably, of annexing Pleasure to this
Operation of the Mind, was to quicken and encourage us in our Searches
after Truth, since the distinguishing one thing from another, and the
right discerning betwixt our Ideas, depends wholly upon our comparing
them together, and observing the Congruity or Disagreement that appears
among the several Works of Nature.

But I shall here confine my self to those Pleasures of the Imagination,
[which [1]] proceed from Ideas raised by Words, because most of the
Observations that agree with Descriptions, are equally Applicable to
Painting and Statuary.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a
Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things
themselves. The Reader finds a Scene drawn in stronger Colours, and
painted more to the Life in his Imagina