plation then creates the thing
contemplated. He is now the busy actor in a world which he himself only
views; alone, he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs, he weeps; his
brows and lips, and his very limbs move.

Poets and even painters, who, as Lord Bacon describes witches, "are
imaginative," have often involuntarily betrayed, in the act of
composition, those gestures which accompany this enthusiasm. Witness
DOMENICHINO enraging himself that he might portray anger. Nor were these
creative gestures quite unknown to QUINTILIAN, who has nobly compared them
to the lashings of the lion's tail, rousing him to combat. Actors of
genius have accustomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before
the curtain was drawn, that they might fill their minds with all the
phantoms of the drama, and so suspend all communion with the external
world. The great actress of our age, during representation, always had the
door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen to, and if possible
watch the whole performance, with the same attention as was experienced by
the spectators. By this means she possessed herself of all the illusion of
the scene; and when she herself entered on the stage, her dreaming
thoughts then brightened into a vision, where the perceptions of the soul
were as firm and clear as if she were really the Constance or the
Katherine whom she only represented.[A]

[Footnote A: The late Mrs. SIDDONS. She herself communicated this striking
circumstance to me.]

Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the more vivid exercise of
genius, Lord KAIMES seems to have been the first who, in a work on
criticism, attempted to name _the ideal presence_, to distinguish it from
the _real presence_ of things. It has been called the representative
faculty, the imaginative state, and many other states and faculties. Call
it what we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode of its operations,
no metaphysical definition expresses its variable nature. Conscious of the
existence of such a faculty, our critic perceived that the conception of
it is by no means clear when described in words.

Has not the difference between an actual thing, and its image in a glass,
perplexed some philosophers? and it is well known how far the ideal
philosophy has been carried by so fine a genius as Bishop BERKELEY. "All
are pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sensorium!"
exclaimed the enthusiast BARRY, who only saw pictures in n