failing, or undipped vulnerable part where sarcasm may stick or stay, it
is caught at, and pointed at, and buzzed about, and fixed upon, and
stung into, as a recent wound is by flies, and nothing is ever taken
seriously nor as it was meant, but always, if it may be, turned the
wrong way, and misunderstood; and while this is so, there is not, nor
cannot be any hope of achievement of high things; men dare not open
their hearts to us, if we are to broil them on a thorn-fire.

Sec. 11. Imagination is quiet; fancy, restless.

This, then, is one essential difference between imagination and fancy,
and another is like it and resultant from it, that the imagination being
at the heart of things, poises herself there, and is still, quiet, and
brooding; comprehending all around her with her fixed look, but the
fancy staying at the outside of things, cannot see them all at once, but
runs hither and thither, and round and about to see more and more,
bounding merrily from point to point, and glittering here and there, but
necessarily always settling, if she settle at all, on a point only,
never embracing the whole. And from these single points she can strike
out analogies and catch resemblances, which, so far as the point she
looks at is concerned, are true, but would be false, if she could see
through to the other side. This, however, she cares not to do, the point
of contact is enough for her, and even if there be a gap left between
the two things and they do not quite touch, she will spring from one to
the other like an electric spark, and be seen brightest in her leaping.

Sec. 12. The detailing operation of fancy.

Now these differences between the imagination and the fancy hold, not
only in the way they lay hold of separate conceptions, but even in the
points they occupy of time, for the fancy loves to run hither and
thither in time, and to follow long chains of circumstances from link to
link; but the imagination, if it may, gets holds of a moment or link in
the middle that implies all the rest, and fastens there. Hence Fuseli's
aphorism, "Invention never suffers the action to expire, nor the
spectator's fancy to consume itself in preparation, or stagnate into
repose. It neither begins from the egg, nor coldly gathers the remains."

In Retsch's illustrations to Schiller's Kampf mit dem Drachen, we have
an instance, miserably feeble indeed, but characteristic, and suited to
our present purpose, of the detailing, finishi