, the
judicious Author's mind is enthralled by Etymology; he takes up the
original word as his guide and escort, and too often does not perceive
how soon he becomes its prisoner, without liberty to tread in any
path but that to which it confines him. It is not easy to find out
how imagination, thus explained, differs from distinct remembrance of
images; or fancy from quick and vivid recollection of them: each is
nothing more than a mode of memory. If the two words bear the above
meaning, and no other, what term is left to designate that faculty of
which the Poet is 'all compact;' he whose eyes glances from earth to
heaven, whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt
in turning to shape; or what is left to characterize Fancy,
as insinuating herself into the heart of objects with creative
activity?--Imagination, in the sense of the word as giving title to
a class of the following Poems, has no reference to images that are
merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external
objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the
mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition,
governed by certain fixed laws. I proceed to illustrate my meaning by
instances. A parrot _hangs_ from the wires of his cage by his beak or
by his claws; or a monkey from the bough of a tree by his paws or
his tail. Each creature does so literally and actually. In the first
Eclogue of Virgil, the shepherd, thinking of the time when he is to
take leave of his farm, thus addresses his goats:--

Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro
Dumosa _pendere_ procul de rupe videbo.
----half way down
_Hangs_ one who gathers samphire,

is the well-known expression of Shakespeare, delineating an ordinary
image upon the cliffs of Dover. In these two instances is a slight
exertion of the faculty which I denominate imagination, in the use
of one word: neither the goats nor the samphire-gatherer do literally
hang, as does the parrot or the monkey; but, presenting to the senses
something of such an appearance, the mind in its activity, for its own
gratification, contemplates them as hanging.

As when far off at sea a fleet descried
_Hangs_ in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate or Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs; they on the trading flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply, stemming nightly toward th