ting, is based the operation of the imaginative faculty with
which we are at present concerned, and in which its glory is
consummated: whereby, depriving the subject of material and bodily
shape, and regarding such of its qualities only as it chooses for
particular purpose, it forges these qualities together in such groups
and forms as it desires, and gives to their abstract being consistency
and reality, by striking them as it were with the die of an image
belonging to other matter, which stroke having once received, they pass
current at once in the peculiar conjunction and for the peculiar value
desired.

Thus, in the description of Satan quoted in the first chapter, "And like
a comet burned," the bodily shape of the angel is destroyed, the
inflaming of the formless spirit is alone regarded; and this, and his
power of evil associated in one fearful and abstract conception are
stamped to give them distinctness and permanence with the image of the
comet, "that fires the length of Ophiuchus huge." Yet this could not be
done, but that the image of the comet itself is in a measure indistinct,
capable of awful expansion, and full of threatening and fear. Again, in
his fall, the imagination binds up the thunder, the resistance, the
massy prostration, separates them from the external form, and binds them
together by the help of that image of the mountain half sunk; which
again would be unfit but for its own indistinctness, and for that
glorious addition "with all his pines," whereby a vitality and
spear-like hostility are communicated to its falling form, and the fall
is marked as not utter subversion, but sinking only, the pines remaining
in their uprightness, and unity, and threatening of darkness upon the
descended precipice: and again in that yet more noble passage at the
close of the fourth book, where almost every operation of the
contemplative imagination is concentrated; the angelic squadron first
gathered into one burning mass by the single expression "sharpening in
mooned horns," then told out in their unity and multitude and stooped
hostility, by the image of the wind upon the corn; Satan endowed with
godlike strength and endurance in that mighty line, "like Teneriffe or
Atlas, unremoved," with infinitude of size the next instant, and with
all the vagueness and terribleness of spiritual power, by the "horror
plumed," and the "_what seemed_ both spear and shield."

Sec. 5. The third office of fancy distinguished