ly apart as are their
apparent stations, they are nevertheless tenants of the same ground,
namely, actual nature; the only difference being, that one is
the sovereign of the purely physical, the other of the moral and
intellectual, while their common medium is the catholic ground of the
imagination.

We do not fear either skeptical demur or direct contradiction, when
we assert that the imagination is as much the medium of the homely
Ostade, as of the refined Raffaelle. For what is that, which has just
wrapped us as in a spell when we entered his humble cottage,--which,
as we wandered through it, invested the coarsest object with a
strange charm? Was it the _truth_ of these objects that we there
acknowledged? In part, certainly, but not simply the truth that
belongs to their originals; it was the truth of his own individual
mind superadded to that of nature, nay, clothed upon besides by his
imagination, imbuing it with all the poetic hues which float in the
opposite regions of night and day, and which only a poet can mingle
and make visible in one pervading atmosphere. To all this our own
minds, our own imaginations, respond, and we pronounce it true to
both. We have no other rule, and well may the artists of every age and
country thank the great Lawgiver that there _is no other_. The
despised _feeling_ which the schools have scouted is yet the
mother of that science of which they vainly boast. But of this we may
have more to say in another place.

We shall now ascend from the _probable_ to the _possible_,
to that branch of Invention whose proper office is from the known but
fragmentary to realize the unknown; in other words, to embody the
possible, having its sphere of action in the world of Ideas. To this
class, therefore, may properly be assigned the term _Ideal_.

And here, as being its most important scene, it will be necessary to
take a more particular view of the verifying principle, the agent, so
to speak, that gives reality to the inward, when outwardly manifested.

Now, whether we call this Human or Poetic Truth, or _inward
life_, it matters not; we know by _its effects_, (as we have
already said, and we now repeat,) that some such principle does exist,
and that it acts upon us, and in a way analogous to the operation of
that which we call truth and life in the world about us. And that the
cause of this analogy is a real affinity between the two powers seems
to us confirmed, not only _positively_ by this a