shall make on others.

III. KALEVALA

But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive
quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives
from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter
reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by
conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the
conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with
expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call
art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a
vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was
conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not
communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come
down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of
its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the
understanding, and, passing into the common currency of speech, become
the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which
is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the
property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here
a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases
and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions
remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy
combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and
natural relation with the world about him, however little or however
much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious
and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes
with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social
refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced
among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and
will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that
primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds
its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an illustration
is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few
passages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural
and primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and
dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Fi