tion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither
involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and
co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic
touch of the impulse from without, creates anew for himself the
correspondent object. The formation of a copy is not solved by the mere
pre-existence of an original; the copyist of Raffael's "Transfiguration"
must repeat more or less perfectly the process of Raffael.

The imagination, therefore, is essentially creative. I consider
imagination either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I
hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and
as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
infinite I AM.

The secondary I consider as an echo of the former; it dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealise
and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects are
essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities
and definites. The fancy is no other than a mode of memory emancipated
from the order of time and space, and blended with, and modified by,
choice. But, equally with the ordinary memory, it must receive its
materials ready made, from the law of association.

_V.--What is a Poem?_

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of
poetry--the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
adherence to the truth of Nature, and the power of giving the interest
of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm
which accidents of light and shade, moonlight or sunset, diffuse over a
familiar landscape appeared to represent the practicability of combining
both.

The thought suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed of
two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at
least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the
interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as
would naturally accompany such situations. For the second class,
subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to se