refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of
the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the
imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the
understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them
of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical
enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from
the progress of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon
that gives birth and scope to the imagination: we can only fancy what we
do not know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them
with what shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and
drear enchantments, so, in our ignorance of the world about us, we make
gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the wilful
suggestions of our hopes and fears.

"And visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough."

There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens
have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse to
the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the
distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture brings
the matter nearer to us.--It is not only the progress of mechanical
knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are
unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the
preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more
indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous
ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed
to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or
"bandit fierce," or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. The time has
been that "our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as
life were in it." But the police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as
dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in this country for
the sake of the music; and in the United States of America, where the
philosophical principles of government are carried still farther in theory
and practice, we find that the Beggar's Opera is hooted from the stage.
Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely
and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable
prose style.

"Obscurity her curta