The whole description may have been written with great rapidity, or with anxious and tentative labour:  the memories of boyish days may have been kindled with a sudden illumination, or they may have grown slowly into the requisite distinctness, detail after detail emerging from the general obscurity, like the appearing stars at night.  But whether the poet felt his way to images and epithets, rapidly or slowly, is unimportant; we have to do only with the result; and the result implies, as an absolute condition, that the images were distinct.  Only thus could they serve the purposes of poetry, which must arouse in us memories of similar scenes, and kindle emotions of pleasurable experience.

III.

Having cited an example of bad writing consequent on imperfect Vision, and an example of good writing consequent on accurate Vision, I might consider that enough had been done for the immediate purpose of the present chapter; the many other illustrations which the Principle of Vision would require before it could be considered as adequately expounded, I must defer till I come to treat of the application of principles.  But before closing this chapter it may be needful to examine some arguments which have a contrary tendency, and imply, or seem to imply, that distinctness of Vision is very far from necessary.

At the outset we must come to an understanding as to this word “image,” and endeavour to free the word “vision” from all equivoque.  If these words were understood literally there would be an obvious absurdity in speaking of an image of a sound, or of seeing an emotion.  Yet if by means of symbols the effect of a sound is produced in us, or the psychological state of any human being is rendered intelligible to us, we are said to have images of these things, which the poet has imagined.  It is because the eye is the most valued and intellectual of our senses that the majority of metaphors are borrowed from its sensations.  Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.  If a phrase can summon a terror resembling that summoned by the danger which it indicates, a man is said to see the danger.  Sometimes a phrase will awaken more vivid images of danger than would be called up by the actual presence of the dangerous object; because the mind will more readily apprehend the symbols of the phrase than interpret the indications of unassisted sense.

Burke in his “Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful,” lays down the proposition that distinctness of imagery is often injurious to the effect of art.  “It is one thing,” he says, “to make an idea clear, another to make it affecting to the imagination.  If I make a drawing of a palace or a temple or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect of imitation, which is something) my picture can at most affect only as the