t means something very different to the aesthetic
sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
personification with that typical expression which is the true function
of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.

Revenge impatient rose;
He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
And, with a withering look,
The war-denouncing trumpet took,
And blew a blast so loud and dread,
Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
And ever and anon he beat
The doubling drum with furious heat.

"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
murderous tread behind us:

The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.

Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise
or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
the two points most apt to impress the imagination.

The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
read--

Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
Than there was water in the Sestian seas.

In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
skies" we have not only the simple fact that th