ike ivy round some ancient elm they twine
In grisly folds and strictures serpentine;
Yet while they strangle, a fair growth they bring
For recompence--their own perennial bower;'--

were suggested to me by a beautiful tree clad as thus described, which
you may remember in Lady Fleming's park at Rydal, near the path to the
upper waterfall.

S----, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds _imagery_ and
_imagination_. Sensible objects really existing, and felt to exist, are
_imagery_; and they may form the materials of a descriptive poem, where
objects are delineated as they are. Imagination is a subjective term: it
deals with objects not as they are, but as they appear to the mind of
the poet.

The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which
the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified both
in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of dramatic
_tableaux_, by which the persons of the play are invested with new
drapery, or placed in new attitudes; or it is that chemical faculty by
which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are
blended together into one harmonious and homogeneous whole.

A beautiful instance of the modifying and _investive_ power of
imagination may be seen in that noble passage of Dyer's 'Ruins of
Rome,'[261] where the poet hears the voice of Time; and in Thomson's
description of the streets of Cairo, expecting the arrival of the
caravan which had perished in the storm,[262]

Read all Cowley; he is very valuable to a collector of English sound
sense.... Burns's 'Scots wha hae' is poor as a lyric composition.

Ariosto and Tasso are very absurdly depressed in order to elevate Dante.
Ariosto is not always sincere; Spenser always so.

I have tried to read Goethe. I never could succeed. Mr. ---- refers me
to his 'Iphigenia,' but I there recognise none of the dignified
simplicity, none of the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines
of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer. The lines of Lucretius
describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe's
long poem. Again, there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his
works which is utterly revolting. I am not intimately acquainted with
them generally. But I take up my ground on the first canto of 'Wilhelm
Meister;' and, as the attorney-general of human nature, I there indict
him for wantonly outraging the sympathies of humanity. Theologia