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

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.

SECTION II. POETIC IMAGINATION.

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 has 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

ments must be combined in the character of an eminent artist. First, he must be endowed with a rich and vigorous imagination, by which he may form beautiful and striking conceptions; and, secondly, he must be able to realize his conceptions in some material form, so that they may create their proper impression upon the minds of others. Artists may fail from the want of either of these elements. If a man be ever so highly gifted with imagination, but be deficient in power of execution, unable to establish any medium of communication between himself and other men, he will be forever exposed to mortifying failure. He may speak or lecture well on his art, but he can never become a successful artist. Such was apparently the case with Haydon. On the other hand, when imagination is wanting, the practitioner may be a skilful copyist; if a painter, he may draw with accuracy, or represent with fidelity, whatever he sees; but he can never attain to the highest conception of art.

The manner in which these two processes are united in art is various. Sometimes, as I have before remarked, the conception is elaborated and perfected in the mind, before it receives any external expression. Gray's Elegy and Burns' "Wallace's Address to his Soldiers," are said to have been completed before a word was written. In other cases,

the rough draft is first committed to canvas, or written out in words, and this is elaborated and modified, until it has attained to all the perfection of which the author is capable. Milton was for many years engaged in the plan of Paradise Lost, and there now exist in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, his various drafts, approaching nearer to the plan which he finally adopted. Which of these modes is to be preferred must be left to the mental habits of the artist. As a general rule, however, it may be remarked that the more thoroughly any work is excogitated in the be

ginning, the less will be the labor of composition, and the more marked and observable the symmetry of the whole.

But suppose that this first intellectual labor has been accomplished, and a conception has been formed which we desire to present to our fellow-men. What shape shall this expression assume? The answer to this question will depend upon the endowments special to the individual.

If this conception has been formed in a mind endowed simply with the power of language, it will be expressed in prose.

Suppose, that, in addition to the power of language, an artist possess also an ear for rhyme, he will express it in poetry. If, on the other hand, he be endowed with the power of delineating form, he will execute his conception in marble or stone, and become a sculptor or an architect.

If he have the power of expression, not only in form, but also in color, he will be a painter.

Thus, the fountain from which all the fine arts take their rise is precisely the same. It is the power of creating in our own minds images of beauty or sublimity. Hence flow the various forms of art in the channels marked out by our individual endowments. It is rare that an individual is gifted with more than one of these modes of expression, though, in highly favored instances, they are occasionally combined. Michael Angelo was equally distinguished in sculpture, painting and architecture; and was, besides, no mean poet. Washington Allston was both a painter and a poet. Such gifts are, however, uncommon, and success in a single department may well satisfy the ambition of any artist.

We see, then, the reason of the rule in rhetoric, that, in order to test the correctness of a metaphor, we should conceive of it as represented on canvas. We here recognize the principle that the spiritual part of the work is the same