ntasies, that apprehend more than cooler
reason" can.

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination."

If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a
fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are,
because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. Ariosto has
described the loves of Angelica and Medoro; but was not Medoro, who carved
the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her
charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the
hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth,
lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical
man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to
laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by
any thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the
brain of the inventor; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's
philosophical Republic.

Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the
passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our
wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical
language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which ecstacy
is very cunning in." Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a
mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible,
constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings
of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a
reflected light, that while it shows us the object, throws a sparkling
radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the
imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost
recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents
forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms
or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion i