Lectures on the English Poets | Page 3

and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows
of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to
external things, as reason and history do." It is strictly the language of
the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents
objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other
thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and
combinations of power. This language is not the less true to nature,
because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and
natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the
influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be
presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear-- and the
imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the
likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes
are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal law of

the imagination,
"That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some
bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy
is each bush suppos'd a bear!"
When Iachimo says of Imogen,
"------The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep
her lids
To see the enclosed lights"--
this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with
the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the
poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining
gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty and
a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination
than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower:
not that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size
beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of
the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and
ponderous strength than another object of ten times the same
dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion
of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which have the
power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration,
delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause,
"for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or impious in
this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other
image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and
his despair!
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses the

sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhausts
the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples with
impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us back
upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our
being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid
whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest
contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing but
his unkind daughters could have brought him to this;" what a
bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot
be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has
bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow,
like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he
exclaims in the mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and
Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion to
imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring up
ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes,
searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last
remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast,
only to torture and kill it! In like manner, the "So I am" of Cordelia
gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of
love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years.
What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello--with
what a mingled agony of regret and despair he