Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?

which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:

Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
So many ages hath been falling, falling?

You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.

It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
coherence.

We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:

Whan any speche yeomen ys
Up to the paleys, anon ryght
Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
Which that the worde in erthe spak,
Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
And so were hys lykenesse,
And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
That it the same body be,
Man or woman, he or she.

We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
of sympathetic imagination