tone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure
and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the
indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the
two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison. After what has been
said, the image of the cloud need not be commented upon.

Thus far of an endowing or modifying power: but the Imagination also
shapes and _creates_; and how? By innumerable processes; and in none
does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity,
and dissolving and separating unity into number,--alternations
proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in
her own mighty and almost divine powers. Recur to the passage already
cited from Milton. When the compact Fleet, as one Person, has been
introduced 'Sailing from Bengala.' 'They,' _i.e._ the 'merchants,'
representing the fleet resolved into a multitude of ships, 'ply' their
voyage towards the extremities of the earth: 'So' (referring to the word
'As' in the commencement) 'seemed the flying Fiend;' the image of his
person acting to recombine the multitude of ships into one body,--the
point from which the comparison set out. 'So seemed,' and to whom
seemed? To the heavenly Muse who dictates the poem, to the eye of the
Poet's mind, and to that of the Reader, present at one moment in the
wide Ethiopian, and the next in the solitudes, then first broken in
upon, of the infernal regions!

Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.

Here again this mighty Poet,--speaking of the Messiah going forth to
expel from heaven the rebellious angels,

Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints
He onward came: far off his coming shone,--

the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Messiah himself, lost
almost and merged in the splendour of that indefinite abstraction 'His
coming!'

As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than to throw some
light upon the present Volumes, and especially upon one division of
them, I shall spare myself and the Reader the trouble of considering the
Imagination as it deals with thoughts and sentiments, as it regulates
the composition of characters, and determines the course of actions: I
will not consider it (more than I have already done by implication) as
that power which, in the language of one of my most esteemed Friends,
'draws all things to one; which makes things animate or inanimate,
beings with their attributes, subjects with their acces