ow wish you to understand by the Fancy, including all
imaginative energy, correcting these lines of Wordsworth's to a more
worthy description of a true lover's happiness. When a boy falls in
love with a girl, you say he has taken a fancy for her; but if he love
her rightly, that is to say for her noble qualities, you ought to say
he has taken an imagination for her; for then he is endued with the
new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in her,--and this
neither falsely nor vainly. His love does not bestow, it discovers,
what is indeed most precious in his mistress, and most needful for
his own life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her better, he
discerns her more truly; and it is only the truth of his love that
does so. Falsehood to her, would at once disenchant and blind him.

[Footnote 23: Vide pp. 124-5.]

In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you with what
extreme simplicity and reality the Christian faith must have presented
itself to the Northern Pagan's mind, in its distinction from
his former confused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that
simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this Faith became
to them, and to the other savage nations of Europe, Tutress of the
real power of their imagination and it became so, only in so far as
it indeed conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects
mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly _true_, as compared
with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of
the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the _seeing_
imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all
the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which
became, indeed, Divine, by being, with the most affectionate truth,
human.

And the association of this truth in loving conception, with the
general honesty and truth of the character, is again conclusively
shown in the feelings of the lover to his mistress; which we recognize
as first reaching their height in the days of chivalry. The truth and
faith of the lover, and his piety to Heaven, are the foundation, in
his character, of all the joy in imagination which he can receive
from the conception of his lady's--now no more mortal--beauty. She is
indeed transfigured before him; but the truth of the transfiguration
is greater than that of the lightless aspect she bears to others. When
therefore, in my next lecture, I speak of the Pleasures