saries, take one
colour and serve to one effect.'[18] The grand store-houses of
enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of poetical, as
contradistinguished from human and dramatic Imagination, are the
prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of
Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add those of Spenser. I select
these writers in preference to those of ancient Greece and Rome, because
the anthropomorphitism of the Pagan religion subjected the minds of the
greatest poets in those countries too much to the bondage of definite
form; from which the Hebrews were preserved by their abhorrence of
idolatry. This abhorrence was almost as strong in our great epic Poet,
both from circumstances of his life, and from the constitution of his
mind. However imbued the surface might be with classical literature, he
was a Hebrew in soul; and all things tended in him towards the sublime.
Spenser, of a gentler nature, maintained his freedom by aid of his
allegorical spirit, at one time inciting him to create persons out of
abstractions; and, at another, by a superior effort of genius, to give
the universality and permanence of abstractions to his human beings, by
means of attributes and emblems that belong to the highest moral truths
and the purest sensations,--of which his character of Una is a glorious
example. Of the human and dramatic Imagination the works of Shakspeare
are an inexhaustible source.

[18] Charles Lamb upon the genius of Hogarth.

I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you Daughters!

And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distinguished by this prime
quality, whose names I omit to mention; yet justified by recollection of
the insults which the ignorant, the incapable and the presumptuous, have
heaped upon these and my other writings, I may be permitted to
anticipate the judgment of posterity upon myself, I shall declare
(censurable, I grant, if the notoriety of the fact above stated does not
justify me) that I have given in these unfavourable times, evidence of
exertions of this faculty upon its worthiest objects, the external
universe, the moral and religious sentiments of Man, his natural
affections, and his acquired passions; which have the same ennobling
tendency as the productions of men, in this kind, worthy to be holden in
undying remembrance.

To the mode in which Fancy has already been characterised as the power
of evoking and combini