a proposition affirming a predicate of a subject; the other ends in a picture affirming nothing. The one asserts a truth, the other presents a conception. That the most gifted men are frequently endowed with both of these powers in a high degree, and that the possession of both is necessary to great intellectual efforts, is granted; but this no more proves them to be either identical or similar, than the necessity of reason and memory to intellectual effort proves these faculties identical.

If we examine the several acts of this faculty, we may, I think, observe a difference between them. We have the power to originate images or pictures for ourselves, and we have the power to form them as they are presented to us in language. The former may be called active, and the latter \ passive imagination. The active I believe always includes the passive power, but the passive does not always include the active. Thus we frequently observe persons, who delight in poetry and romance, who are utterly incapable of creating a scene or composing a stanza. They can form the pictures dictated by language, but are destitute of the power of original combination. Even this secondary and inferior form of imagination is possessed in different degrees. Every one in the habit of giving instruction, especially when description is necessary, must have been convinced of the great difference of individuals in this respect. Some persons create a picture for themselves as soon as it is presented in language. Others form it with difficulty, after repeated trials; and at last we are uncertain whether the conception in our own mind is the same as that awakened in the mind of another. It is on this power, chiefly, that the love of poetry and fiction depends. Hence, we frequently find persons of good sense and strong judgment, who never manifest any taste for imaginative writing. This type of character is most frequently observed in those who have not com

menced their education until late in life. The imagination is most active in youth, and if it remain undeveloped until the period of youth be past, it rarely attains its full power or its natural proportions.

The active power of imagining is bestowed with still greater diversity. Some men are poets by nature. Hence the maxim, poeta nascitur non fit,- a poet is formed by nature, not by education. Men endowed with a creative imagination are continually perceiving analogies, forming comparisons, and originating scenes of beauty or grandeur, out of all that they observe and all that they remember. Johnson was sitting one evening by the side of a table, on which two candles were burning. The conversation turned on Thomson. “Thomson,” said he, "could not see those two candles without forming a poetical image out of them." On the other hand, we are told of a celebrated mathematician, who, after reading the Paradise Lost, laid down the book in disgust, with the significant question, "What does it prove?" In the one case, the imagination had been exclusively cultivated; in the other, the reasoning power. The one had been accustomed to form pictures, the other demonstrations. Neither could have been interested in the labors of the other. Both would probably have derived advantages from a more generous and universal cultivation of their intellectual powers.

This distinction leads us to observe a mistake, frequently made, respecting the mode of cultivating the imagination. Young persons sometimes spend their time in reading fiction, and tell us that their object is to improve this power of the mind. This kind of reading produces an effect, but not the effect intended. It improves nothing but the passive power of the imagination; that is, it enables us the more readily to conceive of scenes presented to us by language. It cannot enable us to create scenes for ourselves.

If this passive imaginative power is exclusively cultivated, it is even liable to paralyze the power of creation by condemning it to perpetual inaction. Sir Walter Scott was, from boyhood, a vast reader of romances, but he was also an indefatigable story-teller, and would detain his schoolfellows, by the half-day together, with fictions of his own creation, wrought out on the instant from the stores of his inexhaustible fancy.

Again; a distinction may be observed in the nature of the active power of the imagination. Some men instinctively employ this faculty in the creation of images of beauty or sublimity. They address themselves to the taste, and their object is merely to please. Such men are by nature poets. Whatever they see or hear becomes at once materials for the exercise of the fancy. Analogies between the seen and the unseen, the relations of matter and the relations of mind, the objective and the subjective, are continually revealing themselves, and thus giving birth to comparisons, metaphors, similes and pictures. No one can read the poetry of Milton, Shakspeare, Burns, Cowper and Thomson, without observing this wonderful power of creating at will images of transcendent loveliness, from either the lowliest or the loftiest object that the eye rests upon.

But there is another and a smaller class of persons, richly endowed with imagination, in whom this faculty acts on somewhat different principles, and tends to a very different result. The materials which they employ are not scenes, or images of individual beauty, but laws of nature. They address not the taste, but the reason. Their object is not to please, but to instruct. The result at which they arrive is not a picture that can be painted on canvas, but a complex conception of truth united in one idea, and tending to a particular conclusion. Such men no sooner observe a phenomenon than they summon from the whole field of their knowledge

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every law that could relate to this particular case, and select and combine into one conception such of these laws as will reasonably account for the change. Most men, when they observe a phenomenon, know that it must have a cause, but never give themselves the trouble to seek for it. Others are perpetually searching after causes, but seem condemned to search forever in the wrong direction. Men who are preeminently gifted are generally endowed with this power of combination in a remarkable degree. Such were Archimedes, Plato and Aristotle, among the ancients, and among the moderns, Newton, Sir H. Davy, Cuvier, and many of the illustrious men yet spared to us. It has appeared to me that the study of chemistry, when pursued into the regions of original investigation, has a strong tendency to cultivate the highest exercise of this endowment.

As these two forms of the imagination are of special interest, and are to a considerable degree dissimilar, we shall in the following remarks consider them separately.

IMAGINATION, as we have said, is the power of combination. In poetic imagination, its elements are not general abstract ideas, but rather notions of the several parts of different wholes, which may be united at will. The pictures of the imagination are not representations of classes, but are individual images which the mind forms for itself from the conceptions which it has already treasured up.

Thus, when a painter would delineate on canvas an ideal landscape, he has recourse to the various elements of picturesque beauty which are present in his recollection. He nas been in the habit of observing the aspects of nature in all their infinite variety. Tree and shrub river and stream

let, meadow and hill-side, sunlight and shadow, at morning, noon and evening, are all vividly impressed upon his recollection. He forms, at first, a general conception of the picture which he is about to execute. He forms, perhaps, another and another, until the prominent features of his design are determined upon. When the elements of his combination are such as he approves, he proceeds to fill up the outline with such of the accessories as will best harmonize with his subject. When his conception is thus matured, he proceeds to give it form and coloring. The idea which at first existed in his own mind alone, now begins to appear in all the loveliness of a finished picture. It is said that Cole, the distinguished American landscape painter, never drew a line upon canvas until he had not only matured the whole scene in his mind, but even written out the description in full. From this written delineation he rarely made any variation when he transferred his conception to canvas. The case is the same in any other of the fine arts. One of the most impressive ideas that crowds upon the spectator, as he, for the first time, looks upon the interior of a gothic cathedral, is, that all this magnificence of beauty, even to its minute details, must have existed in the mind of the architect before the first stone of the mighty fabric was laid. It all appears like a gorgeous epic,-an Iliad, or a Paradise Lost,

in stone.

In the preceding cases our design is simple. It is merely to present a conception which shall awaken the emotion either of beauty or sublimity in the minds of our fellow-men. Our labor is, in the first place, purely conceptual. It consists in creating in our own minds a picture. Suppose this to have been done; the next step is to give to this conception some external expression, by which we shall transfer to the minds of other men the very image which we have created in our own. Hence we see that two ele