eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal
law of the imagination,

"That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is each bush suppos'd a bear!"

When Iachimo says of Imogen,

"------The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see the enclosed lights"--

this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with
the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the
poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining
gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty
and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the
imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature
to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but because the
excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual
size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling
of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the
same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the
disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which
have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror,
admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge
his cause, "for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or
impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there
is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his
wrongs and his despair!

Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses
the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it;
exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples
with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us
back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our
being