one
does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into
unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,--alternations
proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the
soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers. Recur to the passage
already cited from Milton. When the compact Fleet, as one Person, has
been introduced 'sailing from Bengala,' 'They,' i.e. the 'merchants,'
representing the fleet resolved into a multitude of ships, 'ply' their
voyage towards the extremities of the earth: 'So' (referring to the
word 'As' in the commencement) 'seemed the flying Fiend'; the image
of his Person acting to recombine the multitude of ships into one
body,--the point from which the comparison set out. 'So seemed,' and
to whom seemed? To the heavenly Muse who dictates the poem, to the eye
of the Poet's mind, and to that of the Reader, present at one moment
in the wide Ethiopian, and the next in the solitudes, then first
broken in upon, of the infernal regions!

Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.

Hear again this mighty Poet,--speaking of the Messiah going forth to
expel from heaven the rebellious angels,

Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints
He onward came: far off his coming shone,--

the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Messiah himself, lost
almost and merged in the splendour of that indefinite abstraction 'His
coming!'

As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than to throw some
light upon the present Volumes, and especially upon one division of
them, I shall spare myself and the Reader the trouble of considering
the Imagination as it deals with thoughts and sentiments, as it
regulates the composition of characters, and determines the course
of actions: I will not consider it (more than I have already done by
implication) as that power which, in the language of one of my most
esteemed Friends, 'draws all things to one; which makes things animate
or inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects with their
accessories, take one colour and serve to one effect[4].' The grand
storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of poetical,
as contra-distinguished from human and dramatic Imagination, are the
prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of
Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add to those of Spenser. I select
these writers in preference to those of ancient Greece and Rome,
because the anthropomorphitism of the Pagan