discourse, appear to cohere merely through an arbitrary play of the
fancy.

If an inquiry be instituted into the magic influence of a beautiful
diction, it will always be found that it consists in this happy relation
between external freedom and internal necessity. The principal features
that contribute to this freedom of the imagination are the
individualizing of objects and the figurative or inexact expression of a
thing; the former employed to give force to its sensuousness, the latter
to produce it where it does not exist. When we express a species or kind
by an individual, and portray a conception in a single case, we remove
from fancy the chains which the understanding has placed upon her and
give her the power to act as a creator. Always grasping at completely
determinate images, the imagination obtains and exercises the right to
complete according to her wish the image afforded to her, to animate it,
to fashion it, to follow it in all the associations and transformations
of which it is capable. She may forget for a moment her subordinate
position, and act as an independent power, only self-directing, because
the strictness of the inner concatenation has sufficiently guarded
against her breaking loose from the control of the understanding. An
inexact or figurative expression adds to the liberty, by associating
ideas which in their nature differ essentially from one another, but
which unite in subordination to the higher idea. The imagination adheres
to the concrete object, the understanding to this higher idea, and thus
the former finds movement and variety even where the other verifies a
most perfect continuity. The conceptions are developed according to the
law of necessity, but they pass before the imagination according to the
law of liberty.

Thought remains the same; the medium that represents it is the only thing
that changes. It is thus that an eloquent writer knows how to extract
the most splendid order from the very centre of anarchy, and that he
succeeds in erecting a solid structure on a constantly moving ground, on
the very torrent of imagination.

If we compare together scientific statement or address, popular address,
and fine language, it is seen directly that all three express the idea
with an equal faithfulness as regards the matter, and consequently that
all three help us to acquire knowledge, but that as regards the mode and
degree of this knowledge a very marked difference exists between t