its shapes the language of the imagination and the
passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than
the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics,
for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and
reason: for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and now, was and
is to hold the mirror up to nature," seen through the medium of passion
and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or
abstract reason. The painter of history might as well be required to
represent the face of a person who has just trod upon a serpent with the
still-life expression of a common portrait, as the poet to describe the
most striking and vivid impressions which things can be supposed to make
upon the mind, in the language of common conversation. Let who will strip
nature of the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do
so; the impressions of common sense and strong imagination, that is, of
passion and indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a
separate language to do justice to either. Objects must strike differently
upon the mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we
have a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of
view, nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically speaking)
from novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our
fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We
can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all
objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their
preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our
curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various
illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not
very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it
home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey
worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when
beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a
palace of emerald light. This is also one part of nature, one appearance
which the glow-worm presents, and that not the least interesting; so
poetry is one part of the history of the human mind, though it is neither
science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress
of knowledge and