“Elpenor!  How camest thou under the shadowy darkness?  Hast thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?"[59]

Which Pope renders thus:—­

    O, say, what angry power Elpenor led
    To glide in shades, and wander with the dead? 
    How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
    Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?

I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind!  And yet how is it that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant to us in the other instances?

For a very simple reason.  They are not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion—­a passion which never could possibly have spoken them—­agonized curiosity.  Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in anywise what was not a fact.  The delay in the first three lines, and conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly like the most frightful discord in music.  No poet of true imaginative power could possibly have written the passage.[60]

Therefore we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy.  Coleridge’s fallacy has no discord in it, but Pope’s has set our teeth on edge.  Without farther questioning, I will endeavour to state the main bearings of this matter.

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it.  For it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose.  But it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his weight.

So, then, we have the three ranks:  the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose,[61] because he does not love it.  Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose:  a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden.  And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else