As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
    Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
    Wonder to all who do the same espy
    By what means it could thither come, and whence,
    So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
    Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
    Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

    Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead
    Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.

* * * * *

    Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
    That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
    And moveth altogether if it move at all.

In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction.  The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison.  After what has been said, the image of the cloud need not be commented upon.

Thus far of an endowing or modifying power:  but the Imagination also shapes and creates; and how?  By innumerable processes; and in none does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,—­alternations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers.  Recur to the passage already cited from Milton.  When the compact Fleet, as one Person, has been introduced ‘Sailing from Bengala.’  ‘They,’ i.e. the ‘merchants,’ representing the fleet resolved into a multitude of ships, ‘ply’ their voyage towards the extremities of the earth:  ‘So’ (referring to the word ‘As’ in the commencement) ‘seemed the flying Fiend;’ the image of his person acting to recombine the multitude of ships into one body,—­the point from which the comparison set out.  ‘So seemed,’ and to whom seemed?  To the heavenly Muse who dictates the poem, to the eye of the Poet’s mind, and to that of the Reader, present at one moment in the wide Ethiopian, and the next in the solitudes, then first broken in upon, of the infernal regions!

    Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.

Here again this mighty Poet,—­speaking of the Messiah going forth to expel from heaven the rebellious angels,

    Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints
    He onward came:  far off his coming shone,—­

the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Messiah himself, lost almost and merged in the splendour of that indefinite abstraction ’His coming!’