to
_realize_ the Correspondence. Nothing is more common than,
on hearing or reading of any remarkable character, to find this
instinctive craving, if we may so term it, instantly awakened, and
actively employed in picturing to the imagination some corresponding
form; nor is any disappointment more general, than that which follows
the detection of a discrepancy on actual acquaintance. Indeed, we can
hardly deem it rash, should we rest the validity of this universal
desire on the common experience of any individual, taken at
random,--provided only that he has a particle of imagination. Nor
is its action dependent on our caprice or will. Ask any person of
ordinary cultivation, not to say refinement, how it is with him,
when, his imagination has not been forestalled by some definite fact;
whether he has never found himself _involuntarily_ associating
the good with the beautiful, the energetic with the strong, the
dignified with the ample, or the majestic with the lofty; the refined
with the delicate, the modest with the comely; the base with the
ugly, the brutal with the misshapen, the fierce with the coarse and
muscular, and so on; there being scarcely a shade of character to
which the imagination does not affix some corresponding form.

In a still more striking form may we find the evidence of the law
supposed, if we turn to the young, and especially to those of a poetic
temperament,--to the sanguine, the open, and confiding, the creatures
of impulse, who reason best when trusting only to the spontaneous
suggestions of feeling. What is more common than implicit faith in
their youthful day-dreams,--a faith that lives, though dream after
dream vanish into common air when the sorcerer Fact touches their
eyes? And whence this pertinacious faith that _will_ not die, but
from a spring of life, that neither custom nor the dry understanding
can destroy? Look at the same Youth at a more advanced age, when the
refining intellect has mixed with his affections, adding thought and
sentiment to every thing attractive, converting all things fair to
things also of good report. Let us turn, at the same time, to one
still more advanced,--even so far as to have entered into the
conventional valley of dry bones,--one whom the world is preparing,
by its daily practical lessons, to enlighten with unbelief. If we see
them together, perhaps we shall hear the senior scoff at his younger
companion as a poetic dreamer, as a hunter after phantoms t