ollow that there is imaginative
sympathy between bramble and cedar. There are few natural scenes whose
harmonies are not conceivably improvable either by banishment of some
discordant point, or by addition of some sympathetic one; it constantly
happens that there is a profuseness too great to be comprehended, or an
inequality in the pitch, meaning, and intensity of different parts. The
imagination will banish all that is extraneous, it will seize out of the
many threads of different feeling which nature has suffered to become
entangled, one only, and where that seems thin and likely to break, it
will spin it stouter, and in doing this, it never knots, but weaves in
the new thread, so that all its work looks as pure and true as nature
itself, and cannot be guessed from it but by its exceeding simplicity,
(_known_ from it, it cannot be,) so that herein we find another test of
the imaginative work, that it looks always as if it had been gathered
straight from nature, whereas the unimaginative shows its joints and
knots, and is visibly composition.

Sec. 22. The sign of imaginative work is its appearance of absolute truth.

And here then we arrive at an important conclusion (though one somewhat
contrary to the positions commonly held on the subject,) namely, that if
anything looks unnatural, there can be no imagination in it (at least
not associative.) We frequently hear works that have no truth in them,
justified or elevated on the score of being imaginative. Let it be
understood once for all, that imagination never designs to touch
anything but truth, and though it does not follow that where there is
the appearance of truth, there has been imaginative operation, of this
we may be assured, that where there is appearance of falsehood, the
imagination has had no hand.[54]

For instance, the landscape above mentioned of Titian's St. Jerome may,
for aught I know, be a pure transcript of a rocky slope covered with
chestnuts among his native mountains. It has all the look of a sketch
from nature; if it be not, the imagination developed in it is of the
highest order; if it be, the imagination has only acted in the
suggestion of the dark sky, of the shape of the flakes of solemn cloud,
and of the gleam of russet light along the distant ground.[55]

Again, it is impossible to tell whether the two nearest trunks of the
Aesacus and Hesperie of the Liber Studiorum, especially the large one on
the right with the ivy, have been inv