Whan any speche yeomen ys
  Up to the paleys, anon ryght
  Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
  Which that the worde in erthe spak,
  Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
  And so were hys lykenesse,
  And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
  That it the same body be,
  Man or woman, he or she.

We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive, sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if “the dull substance of his flesh were thought.”  It is not in mere intensity of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness of itself in expression.  I know nothing more profoundly imaginative therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster’s “Duchess of Malfy.”  Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.  When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out: 

  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all unessential particulars) by it.  The one would fain set forth your view of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.  Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the primary emotions of our nature, with the soul’s inquiries into its own being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion that it is profound, its range is limited.  Great poetry should have breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.

But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse the vision of ordinary minds.  For our perceptions of things are gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another.  It is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to itself.  That the power of abstraction has something to do with the imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.  His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream precisely as in life.  When he wakes, his genius has flown away