, and on the slipping
from their threading bough one by one, the fancy is content to lose the
heart of the thing, the solemnity of prayer: or perhaps I do the
glorious poet wrong in saying this, for the sense of a sun worship and
orison in beginning its race, may have been in his mind; and so far as
it was so, the passage is imaginative and not fanciful. But that which
most readers would accept from it, is the mere flash of the external
image, in whose truth the fancy herself does not yet believe and
therefore is not yet contemplative. Here, however, is fancy believing in
the images she creates:--

"It feeds the quick growth of the serpent-vine,
And the dark linked ivy tangling wild
And budding, blown, or odor faded blooms,
Which _star the winds with points of colored light_
As they rain through them; and _bright golden globes
Of fruit suspended in their own green heaven_."

It is not, observe, a mere likeness that is caught here; but the flowers
and fruit are entirely deprived by the fancy of their material
existence, and contemplated by her seriously and faithfully as stars and
worlds; yet it is only external likeness that she catches; she forces
the resemblance, and lowers the dignity of the adopted image.

Next take two delicious stanzas of fancy regardant, (believing in her
creations,) followed by one of heavenly imagination, from Wordsworth's
address to the daisy:--

"A Nun demure--of lowly port;
Or sprightly maiden--of Love's court,
In thy simplicity the sport
Of all temptations.
A Queen in crown of rubies drest,
A starveling in a scanty vest,
Are all as seems to suit thee best,--
Thy appellations.

I see thee glittering from afar,
And then thou art a pretty star,--
Not quite so fair as many are
In heaven above thee.
Yet like a star, with glittering crest,
Self-poised in air thou seem'st to rest;--
May peace come never to his nest
Who shall reprove thee.

Sweet flower--for by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast.
Sweet silent creature,
That breath'st with me, in