tly as if the dreamer were half asleep--a
visionary slumber, which sometimes the dewdrop melting on the leaf will
break, sometimes not the thunder-peal with all its echoes. Imagination
is a brighter and bolder Beauty, with large lamping eyes of uncertain
colour, as if fluctuating with rainbow light, and with features fine as
those which Grecian genius gave to the Muses in the Parian Marble, yet
in their daring delicacy defined like the face of Apollo. As for
Hope--divinest of the divine--Collins, in one long line of light, has
painted the picture of the angel,--

"And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair."

All our great prose-writers owe the glory of their power to our great
poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well--that is as ill--as
Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth
at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless
metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the
Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a
great poet? Nay--we shall not be deterred by the fear of
self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a
great prose-writer? We cannot name one; they all sink in Shakespeare.
Campbell finely asks and answers--

"Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh! what were man? a world without a sun."

Suppose the world without poetry--how absurd would seem the Sun! Strip
the word "phenomena" of its poetical meaning, and forthwith the whole
human race, "moving about in worlds _realised_," would lose their powers
of speech. But, thank Heaven! we are Makers all. Inhabiting, we verily
believe, a real, and substantial, and palpable outer world, which
nevertheless shall one day perish like a scroll, we build our bowers of
joy in the Apparent, and lie down to rest in a drapery of Dreams.

Thus we often love to dream our silent way even through the noisy world.
And dreamers are with dreamers spiritually, though in the body apart;
nor wandering at will think they whence they come, or whither they are
going, assured by delight that they will reach their journey's end--like
a bee, that in many a musical gyration goes humming round men's heads
and tree-tops, aimlessly curious in his joy, yet knowing instinctively
the straight line that intersects all those airy circles, leading to and
fro between his hive in the garden and the honey-dew on the heather
hills.

What can it