Dear C.

"You ask my opinion concerning your chapter on the imagination, both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I think it will make on the public, i. e. that part of the public who, from the title of the work, and from its forming a sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of your readers. "As to myself, and stating, in the first place, the effect on my understanding, your opinions, and method of argument, were not only so new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed to consider as truth, that, even if I had comprehended your premises sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your conclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which, in your note, p. 251, you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is when he makes a bull. in your own words, I should have felt as if I had been standing on my head.

"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light, airy, modern chapels of ease, and then, for the first time, to have been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals, in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. Now in glimmer, now in gloom;' often in palpable darkness, not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad, yet visionary lights, with colored shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and, ever and anon, coming out full upon pictures, and stone-work images and great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those names. Those whom I had been taught to vencrate as almost super-human

your title-page, viz: "MY LITERARY LIFE AND OPI NIONS," published, too, as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on ideal Realism, which holds the same relation, in abstruseness, to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well if, already, you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work, though, as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will, doubtless, be both interesting and instructive to many, to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic ower would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which, beginning with tar, ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to blame.

"I could add, to these arguments, one derived from pecuniary motives, and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present publication; but they would weigh little with you, compared with the preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from your own personal interests, more often act on you as narcotics, than as stimulants, and that, in money concerns, you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must, occasionally, be pulled backward from the boat in order to make you enter it. All suc cess attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you have deserved it. Your affectionate, &c.

niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of Apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed substances, were thinned away into shadows, while, everywhere,

shadows were deepened into substances:

A tale obscure, of high and passionate thoughts To a strange music chaunted!'' "Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the constructive philosophy, which you have promised and announced; and that I will do my best to

understand it. Only, I will not promise to descend into the

dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes which I am required to see.

"So much for myself. But, as for the public, I do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the chapter from the present work, and to reserve it for your

content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume.

The IMAGINATION, then, I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agenCy, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or, where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

announced treatises on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because, imperfectly as I understand the present chapter, I see clearly that you have done too

equally with the ordinary memory, it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Whatever, more than this, I shall think it fit to declare, concerning the powers and privileges of the imagination, in the present work, will be found in the critical essay on the uses of the supernatural in poetry, and the principles that regulate its introduction; which the reader will find prefixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner.

CHAPTER XIV.

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--Preface to the second edition-The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a poem, and poetry with scholia.

DURING the first year that Mr. Words worth and I were neighbors, our conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty, by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself, (to which of us I do not recollect,) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at, was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the “Lyrical Ballads;" in which it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest, and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view, I wrote the "Ancient Mariner," and was preparing, among other poems, the "Dark Ladie," and the "Christabel," in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry, had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained

diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the "Lyrical Ballads" were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which, from their nature, rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life, as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression,) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy, I explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants,

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets, merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they, indeed, contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies, and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found, too, not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed, perhaps, in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say by its religious fervor. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied; meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would, of itself, have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but, on the contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth, in his recent collection, has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honored more than I

deserve, by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare, once for all, in what points I coincide with his opinions, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible, I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a POEM; and secondly, of POETRY itself, in kind, and in essence. The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations, by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months:

"Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November," &c.

that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound is calculated to excite. The final definition, then, so deduced, may be thus worded: A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species, (having this object in common with it,) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Controversy is not seldom excited, in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distichs, each of which, ab

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure may be, the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. Blest, indeed, is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the Bathyllus even of an Anacreon, or the Alexis of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme. entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is,

disjoins it from its context, and makes it a separate whole, instead of an harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reaper collects rapidly the general result, unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely, or chiefly, by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind, excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses, and half recedes, and, from the retrogressive movement, collects the force which again carries him onward. Precipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius Arbiter, most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning, condensed in fewer words.

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of PLATO, and Bishop TAYLOR, and the Theoria Sacra of BURNET, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contra-distinguishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of