ollars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.

[29] Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from
the English Poets_, 1844.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty
rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace
from Drayton's _Nymphidia_:

This palace standeth in the air,
By necromancy placed there,
That it no tempest needs to fear,
Which way soe'er it blow it:
And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon,
Whence lies a way up to the moon,
And thence the fairy can as soon
Pass to the earth below it.
The walls of spiders' legs are made,
Well morticed and finely laid:
He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded:
_The windows of the eyes of cats:_

(because they see best at night)

And for the roof instead of slats
Is cover'd with the skins of bats,
_With moonshine that are gilded._

Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet's _Muse's
Elysium_:

Of leaves of roses, _white and red_,
Shall be the covering of the bed;
The curtains, vallens, tester all,
Shall be the flower imperial;
And for the fringe it all along
_With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
Of lilies shall the pillows be,
With down stuft of the butterfly._

Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John
Suckling, in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, has given some of the most
playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like
twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:

_Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they fear'd the light:_
But oh! she dances such a way!
_No sun upon an Easter day_
Is half so fine a sight.

It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a
lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in
the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is
imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted
everybody:

Her lips were red, _and one was thin_
_Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly._

Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.

With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse
ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced,
it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be writte