If these ends are to be attained by the mere communication of knowledge, it does not lie here.—­TASTE, I would remind the reader, like IMAGINATION, is a word which has been forced to extend its services far beyond the point to which philosophy would have confined them.  It is a metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive,—­to intellectual acts and operations.  The word, Imagination, has been overstrained, from impulses honourable to mankind, to meet the demands of the faculty which is perhaps the noblest of our nature.  In the instance of Taste, the process has been reversed; and from the prevalence of dispositions at once injurious and discreditable, being no other than that selfishness which is the child of apathy,—­which, as Nations decline in productive and creative power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging.  Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts.  Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent to this office;—­for in its intercourse with these the mind is passive, and is affected painfully or pleasurably as by an instinct.  But the profound and the exquisite in feeling, the lofty and universal in thought and imagination; or, in ordinary language, the pathetic and the sublime;—­are neither of them, accurately speaking, objects of a faculty which could ever without a sinking in the spirit of Nations have been designated by the metaphor—­Taste.  And why?  Because without the exertion of a co-operating power in the mind of the Reader, there can be no adequate sympathy with either of these emotions:  without this auxiliary impulse, elevated or profound passion cannot exist.

Passion, it must be observed, is derived from a word which signifies suffering; but the connection which suffering has with effort, with exertion, and action, is immediate and inseparable.  How strikingly is this property of human nature exhibited by the fact, that, in popular language, to be in a passion, is to be angry!—­But,

    Anger in hasty words or blows
    Itself discharges on its foes.

To be moved, then, by a passion, is to be excited, often to external, and always to internal, effort:  whether for the continuance and strengthening of the passion, or for its suppression, accordingly as the course which it takes may be painful or pleasurable.  If the latter, the soul must contribute to its support, or it never becomes vivid,—­and soon languishes, and dies.  And this brings us to the point.