have conceived
respecting the lachrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood, will
affect the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If
Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by
no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely
improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on
the subject as is to be found in the Fable of the Bees. But could
Mandeville have created an Iago? Well as he knew how to resolve
characters into their elements, would he have been able to combine those
elements in such a manner as to make up a man--a real, living,
individual man?

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a
certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which gives so much pleasure
ought to be called unsoundness. By poetry we mean not all writing in
verse, nor even all good writing in verse. Our definition excludes many
metrical compositions which, on other grounds, deserve the highest
praise. By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as
to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of
words what the painter does by means of colors. Thus the greatest of
poets has described it, in lines universally admired for the vigor and
felicity of their diction, and still more valuable on account of the
just notion which they convey of the art in which he excelled:--

"As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

These are the fruits of the "fine frenzy" which he ascribes to the
poet--a fine frenzy, doubtless, but still a frenzy. Truth, indeed, is
essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are
just; but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been
made, everything ought to be consistent; but those first suppositions
require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and
temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence of all people children are
the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every
illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye
produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility
may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear as a little girl is affected
by the story of poor Red Riding-hood. She knows that it is all false,
that wol