is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.—­Yet is it not the less true that Fancy, as she is an active, is also, under her own laws and in her own spirit, a creative faculty.  In what manner Fancy ambitiously aims at a rivalship with Imagination, and Imagination stoops to work with materials of Fancy, might be illustrated from the compositions of all eloquent writers, whether in prose or verse; and chiefly from those of our own Country.  Scarcely a page of the impassioned parts of Bishop Taylor’s Works can be opened that shall not afford examples.—­Referring the Reader to those inestimable volumes, I will content myself with placing a conceit (ascribed to Lord Chesterfield) in contrast with a passage from the ’Paradise Lost:’—­

    The dews of the evening most carefully shun,
    They are the tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.

After the transgression of Adam, Milton, with other appearances of sympathising Nature, thus marks the immediate consequence,

    Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
    Wept at completion of the mortal sin.

The associating link is the same in each instance:  Dew and rain, not distinguishable from the liquid substance of tears, are employed as indications of sorrow.  A flash of surprise is the effect in the former case; a flash of surprise, and nothing more; for the nature of things does not sustain the combination.  In the latter, the effects from the act, of which there is this immediate consequence and visible sign, are so momentous, that the mind acknowledges the justice and reasonableness of the sympathy in nature so manifested; and the sky weeps drops of water as if with human eyes, as ’Earth had before trembled from her entrails, and Nature given a second groan.’

Finally, I will refer to Cotton’s ‘Ode upon Winter,’ an admirable composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of Fancy.  The middle part of this ode contains a most lively description of the entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as ‘A palsied king,’ and yet a military monarch,—­advancing for conquest with his army; the several bodies of which, and their arms and equipments, are described with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of fanciful comparisons, which indicate on the part of the poet extreme activity of intellect, and a correspondent hurry of delightful feeling.  Winter retires from the foe into his fortress, where

          —­a magazine
    Of sovereign juice is cellared in;
    Liquor that will the siege maintain
    Should Phoebus ne’er return again.

Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing what follows, as an instance still more happy of Fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than, in its preceding passages, the Poem supplies of her management of forms.