S——­, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds imagery and imagination.  Sensible objects really existing, and felt to exist, are imagery; and they may form the materials of a descriptive poem, where objects are delineated as they are.  Imagination is a subjective term:  it deals with objects not as they are, but as they appear to the mind of the poet.

The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified both in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of dramatic tableaux, by which the persons of the play are invested with new drapery, or placed in new attitudes; or it is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together into one harmonious and homogeneous whole.

A beautiful instance of the modifying and investive power of imagination may be seen in that noble passage of Dyer’s ’Ruins of Rome,’[261] where the poet hears the voice of Time; and in Thomson’s description of the streets of Cairo, expecting the arrival of the caravan which had perished in the storm,[262]

Read all Cowley; he is very valuable to a collector of English sound sense....  Burns’s ‘Scots wha hae’ is poor as a lyric composition.

Ariosto and Tasso are very absurdly depressed in order to elevate Dante.  Ariosto is not always sincere; Spenser always so.

I have tried to read Goethe.  I never could succeed.  Mr. ——­ refers me to his ‘Iphigenia,’ but I there recognise none of the dignified simplicity, none of the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer.  The lines of Lucretius describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe’s long poem.  Again, there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his works which is utterly revolting.  I am not intimately acquainted with them generally.  But I take up my ground on the first canto of ’Wilhelm Meister;’ and, as the attorney-general of human nature, I there indict him for wantonly outraging the sympathies of humanity.  Theologians tell us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true.  Yet man is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will plead against these poetical sensualists as long as man remains what he is.

[261] 1. 37: 

    ’The pilgrim oft,
     At dead of night, ’mid his oraison, hears
     Aghast the voice of TIME, disparting towers,’ &c.

[262] Thomson’s ‘Summer,’ 980: 

   ’In Cairo’s crowded streets,
    The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,
    And Mecca saddens at the long delay.’

Scientific men are often too fond of aiming to be men of the world.  They crave too much for titles, and stars, and ribbons.  If Bacon had dwelt only in the court of Nature, and cared less for that of James the First, he would have been a greater man, and a happier one too.