ented, or taken straight from
nature, they have all the look of accurate portraiture. I can hardly
imagine anything so perfect to have been obtained except from the real
thing; but we know that the imagination must have begun to operate
somewhere, we cannot tell where, since the multitudinous harmonies of
the rest of the picture could hardly in any real scene have continued so
inviolately sweet.

The final tests, therefore, of the work of associative imagination are
its intense simplicity, its perfect harmony, and its absolute truth. It
may be a harmony, majestic, or humble, abrupt, or prolonged, but it is
always a governed and perfect whole, evidencing in all its relations the
weight, prevalence, and universal dominion of an awful, inexplicable
Power; a chastising, animating, and disposing Mind.

FOOTNOTES

[50] Compare Chapter IV. of this Section.

[51] On the distinction rightly made by the metaphysicians between
conception absolute and conception accompanied by reference to past
time, (or memory,) it is of no necessity here to insist.

[52] Elements of Chemistry, by the late Edward Turner, M.D. Part II.
Sec. IV.

[53] This ray of light, however, has an imaginative power of another
kind presently to be spoken of. Compare Chap. IV. Sec. 18.

[54] Compare Chap. III. Sec.30.

[55] It is said at Venice that Titian took the trees of the St.
Pietro Martiere out of his garden opposite Murano. I think this
unlikely; there is something about the lower trunks that has a taint
of composition: the thought of the whole, however, is thoroughly
fine. The backgrounds of the frescoes at Padua are also very
characteristic, and the well-known woodcut of St. Francis receiving
the stigmata, one of the mightiest of existing landscape thoughts;
and yet it is pure portraiture of pine and Spanish chestnut.

CHAPTER III.

OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE.

Sec. 1. Imagination penetrative is concerned not with the combining but
apprehending of things.

Thus far we have been defining that combining operation of the
imagination, which appears to be in a sort mechanical, yet takes place
in the same inexplicable modes, whatever be the order of conception
submitted to it, though I chose to illustrate it by its dealings with
mere matter before taking cognizance of any nobler subjects of imagery.
We must now examine the dea