ys
are ineffective, but because, on the small scale of the image, the
reduced leaves lose their organization, and look like moss attached to
sticks. In order to retain, therefore, the character of flexibility and
beauty of foliage, the painter is often compelled to increase the
proportionate size of the leaves, and to arrange them in generic
masses. Of this treatment compare the grand examples throughout the
Liber Studiorum. It is by such means only that the ideal character of
objects is to be preserved; as we before observed in the 13th chapter of
the first section. In all these cases exaggeration is only lawful as the
sole means of arriving at truth of impression when strict fidelity is
out of the question.

Other modes of exaggeration there are, on which I shall not at present
farther insist, the proper place for their discussion being in treating
of the sublime, and these which I have at present instanced are enough
to establish the point at issue, respecting imaginative verity, inasmuch
as we find that exaggeration itself, if imaginative, is referred to
principles of truth, and of actual being.

Sec. 22. Recapitulation.

We have now, I think, reviewed the various modes in which imagination
contemplative may be exhibited in art, and arrived at all necessary
certainties respecting the essence of the faculty: which we have found
in all its three functions, associative of truth, penetrative of truth,
and contemplative of truth; and having no dealings nor relations with
any kind of falsity. One task, however, remains to us, namely, to
observe the operation of the theoretic and imaginative faculties
together, in the attempt at realization to the bodily sense of beauty
supernatural and divine.

FOOTNOTES

[70] Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly
dreaming of Shelley over clouds and waves with the masculine and
magnificent grasp of men and things which we find in Scott; it only
happens that these two passages are more illustrative, by the
likeness of the scenery they treat, than any others I could have
opposed; and that Shelley is peculiarly distinguished by the faculty
of contemplative imagination. Scott's healthy and truthful feeling
would not allow him to represent the benighted hunter provoked by
loss of game, horse, and way at once, as indulging in any more
exalted flights of imagination than those naturally consequent on
the contrast between the