Poet is ‘all compact;’ he whose eyes glances from earth to heaven, whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt in turning to shape; or what is left to characterize Fancy, as insinuating herself into the heart of objects with creative activity?—­Imagination, in the sense of the word as giving title to a class of the following Poems, has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws.  I proceed to illustrate my meaning by instances.  A parrot hangs from the wires of his cage by his beak or by his claws; or a monkey from the bough of a tree by his paws or his tail.  Each creature does so literally and actually.  In the first Eclogue of Virgil, the shepherd, thinking of the time when he is to take leave of his farm, thus addresses his goats:—­

Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro Dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo. ——­half way down Hangs one who gathers samphire,

is the well-known expression of Shakespeare, delineating an ordinary image upon the cliffs of Dover.  In these two instances is a slight exertion of the faculty which I denominate imagination, in the use of one word:  neither the goats nor the samphire-gatherer do literally hang, as does the parrot or the monkey; but, presenting to the senses something of such an appearance, the mind in its activity, for its own gratification, contemplates them as hanging.

As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles Of Ternate or Tidore, whence merchants bring Their spicy drugs; they on the trading flood Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape Ply, stemming nightly toward the Pole; so seemed Far off the flying Fiend.

Here is the full strength of the imagination involved in the word hangs, and exerted upon the whole image:  First, the fleet, an aggregate of many ships, is represented as one mighty person, whose track, we know and feel, is upon the waters; but, taking advantage of its appearance to the senses, the Poet dares to represent it as hanging in the clouds, both for the gratification of the mind in contemplating the image itself, and in reference to the motion and appearance of the sublime objects to which it is compared.

From impressions of sight we will pass to those of sound; which, as they must necessarily be of a less definite character, shall be selected from these volumes: 

  Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;

of the same bird,

  His voice was buried among trees,
  Yet to be come at by the breeze;

  O, Cuckoo I shall I call thee Bird,
  Or but a wandering Voice?