r feelings, she cares not how unstable or transitory may be her
influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power to resume it
upon an apt occasion. But the Imagination is conscious of an
indestructible dominion;--the Soul may fall away from it, not being able
to sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by no act
of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or
diminished.--Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part
of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.--Yet is
it not the less true that Fancy, as she is an active, is also, under her
own laws and in her own spirit, a creative faculty. In what manner Fancy
ambitiously aims at a rivalship with Imagination, and Imagination stoops
to work with materials of Fancy, might be illustrated from the
compositions of all eloquent writers, whether in prose or verse; and
chiefly from those of our own Country. Scarcely a page of the
impassioned parts of Bishop Taylor's Works can be opened that shall not
afford examples.--Referring the Reader to those inestimable volumes, I
will content myself with placing a conceit (ascribed to Lord
Chesterfield) in contrast with a passage from the 'Paradise Lost:'--

The dews of the evening most carefully shun,
They are the tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.

After the transgression of Adam, Milton, with other appearances of
sympathising Nature, thus marks the immediate consequence,

Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completion of the mortal sin.

The associating link is the same in each instance: Dew and rain, not
distinguishable from the liquid substance of tears, are employed as
indications of sorrow. A flash of surprise is the effect in the former
case; a flash of surprise, and nothing more; for the nature of things
does not sustain the combination. In the latter, the effects from the
act, of which there is this immediate consequence and visible sign, are
so momentous, that the mind acknowledges the justice and reasonableness
of the sympathy in nature so manifested; and the sky weeps drops of
water as if with human eyes, as 'Earth had before trembled from her
entrails, and Nature given a second groan.'

Finally, I will refer to Cotton's 'Ode upon Winter,' an admirable
composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which
he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of Fancy.
The mid