reature almost of a corporeal
existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power
by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually
heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of
sight.

Thus far of images independent of each other, and immediately endowed by
the mind with properties that do not inhere in them, upon an incitement
from properties and qualities the existence of which is inherent and
obvious. These processes of imagination are carried on either by
conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it
some of those which it actually possesses, and thus enabling it to
re-act upon the mind which hath performed the process, like a new
existence.

I pass from the Imagination acting upon an individual image to a
consideration of the same faculty employed upon images in a conjunction
by which they modify each other. The Reader has already had a fine
instance before him in the passage quoted from Virgil, where the
apparently perilous situation of the goat, hanging upon the shaggy
precipice, is contrasted with that of the shepherd contemplating it from
the seclusion of the cavern in which he lies stretched at ease and in
security. Take these images separately, and how unaffecting the picture
compared with that produced by their being thus connected with, and
opposed to, each other!

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.

* * * * *

Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether if it move at all.

In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying
powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all
brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the
power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast
stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone;
which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the
original image, that of the s