------“Throw him on the steep
Of some loose hanging rock asleep:” 

when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,

“Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
How much more hideous shew’st in a child
Than the sea-monster!”

—­the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied.  We see the thing ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it.  The imagination, by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will.—­We do not wish the thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is.  For knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though it may be the victim of vice or folly.

Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will.  Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason:  for the end and use of poetry, “both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature,” seen through the medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or abstract reason.  The painter of history might as well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common conversation.  Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice to either.  Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness.  We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade.  Some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity.  Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise.  Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening,