In this equivocal state the enthusiast of genius produces his masterpieces.  This waking dream is distinct from reverie, where, our thoughts wandering without connexion, the faint impressions are so evanescent as to occur without even being recollected.  A day of reverie is beautifully painted by ROUSSEAU as distinct from a day of thinking:  “J’ai des journees delicieuses, errant sans souci, sans projet, sans affaire, de bois en bois, et de rocher en rocher, revant toujours et ne pensant point." Far different, however, is one closely-pursued act of meditation, carrying the enthusiast of genius beyond the precinct of actual existence.  The act of contemplation then creates the thing contemplated.  He is now the busy actor in a world which he himself only views; alone, he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs, he weeps; his brows and lips, and his very limbs move.

Poets and even painters, who, as Lord Bacon describes witches, “are imaginative,” have often involuntarily betrayed, in the act of composition, those gestures which accompany this enthusiasm.  Witness DOMENICHINO enraging himself that he might portray anger.  Nor were these creative gestures quite unknown to QUINTILIAN, who has nobly compared them to the lashings of the lion’s tail, rousing him to combat.  Actors of genius have accustomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, that they might fill their minds with all the phantoms of the drama, and so suspend all communion with the external world.  The great actress of our age, during representation, always had the door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen to, and if possible watch the whole performance, with the same attention as was experienced by the spectators.  By this means she possessed herself of all the illusion of the scene; and when she herself entered on the stage, her dreaming thoughts then brightened into a vision, where the perceptions of the soul were as firm and clear as if she were really the Constance or the Katherine whom she only represented.[A]

[Footnote A:  The late Mrs. SIDDONS.  She herself communicated this striking circumstance to me.]

Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the more vivid exercise of genius, Lord KAIMES seems to have been the first who, in a work on criticism, attempted to name the ideal presence, to distinguish it from the real presence of things.  It has been called the representative faculty, the imaginative state, and many other states and faculties.  Call it what we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode of its operations, no metaphysical definition expresses its variable nature.  Conscious of the existence of such a faculty, our critic perceived that the conception of it is by no means clear when described in words.