tion to the observer,
and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are
suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid
movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make
a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a
camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own
family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us.
Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through
your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it
any time these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference
between the observer and the spectacle,--between man and nature.
Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of
the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby
apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself
is stable.

2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By
a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the
camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we
know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye.
He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis
of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself
by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual
man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his
thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as
fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world
is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and
makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination may be
defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.
Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the
purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses
the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody
any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his mind. The remotest
spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are
brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made
aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects
shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his
sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to
be the _shadow_ of his beloved; time, which keeps her fro