N° LXXVI.

On the Pleasures and Uses of Fancy.

WHAT is life without fancy to gild its scenery, and brighten the colours of dull reality? He who has not fancy is deficient in the noblest gem of intellect, and wants the lamp to cheer him in the dark paths of this wilderness of trouble.

In solitude and in poverty it can bring before us the gladsome voice of society, and the enlivening array of wealth; in absence it can restore the object of our affection; and in age bring back the delights of youth. Without it the images of nature; the morning dawn; the evening shadows; the prospect of mountains and vallies; the spreading landscape; the smiling meadow, or recluse dell; the revival and the fall of the leaf and the flower; and the changing colours of the seasons, lose more than half their impression, and almost all their intellectual and moral delight.

What is the prime source of their charm, but the affecting association of ideas which by the aid of fancy they excite? A vivid imagination combines with them past or distant objects, and peoples every scene with its appropriate inhabitants.

In the mind of the poet this power reigns in all its splendour. Let but one idea be waked from without, and a thousand beautiful creations blaze around it, to which his pen may give form and utterance whenever he will exert the toil of perpetuating them in language.

There are many on whom these visions are lost, or considered only as the wanderings of the insane. They value and can comprehend only palpable facts, and the dry deductions of cold reasoning. They affect to have no concern but with truth, by which they mean some material perception in the exact form and modulation in which it is palpable to the senses; or some axiom which is the result of a strict chain of legitimate deduction.

It was thus that an eminent mathematician could find no merit or amusement in Virgil, because he could perceive no proof in him. He brought to the poet's page no treasure of images which slept úpon his senses, and only wanted the sound of a poet's voice to wake them into instant life and activity: he brought not a tremulous heart whose silent chords if slightly touched would long continue involuntarily the tones of sympathetic music. He brought only faculties abstract and dry, that furnished nothing on which the beams of genius could play; or must play without reflection and unfelt.

Why all these powers are given in such profu

sion to some, when they are dispensed so sparingly to others, it is not for human wisdom to determine. If they confer superior happiness, it is well known that they also open to a keener sense of sorrow. The forms of Grief, Pain, and Misfortune, are surrounded by attendant tribes, which appear numerous and terrific in proportion as the fancy is powerful.

A severe and philosophic cast of character, whose constant occupation it is to chastise and regulate its own ideas, it is desirable should exist in a portion of the cultivated classes of mankind. Of these it is the business to separate, and not to combine. They will admit of no comparisons that are not exact, no accidental coalitions of thought or imagery: but clearing their way, examining them one by one, and putting each into a classed arrangement, they produce an artificial shape of things, which destroys the spell of the muse, and makes poetry appear an idle and confused dream.

Enjoy, ye sages, your useful labours! it is right that we should know the fallacies of those delusions, which must not be indulged by all. Ideas not unfrequently spring up in the mind which it is necescessary to disjoin from those which give rise to them.

But after all, is the poet always less acute in this service, when it becomes imperiously requisite, than the philosopher? When he tasks his judgment,

when he bids his fancy be still, the high and various faculties with which he is gifted, will enable him to perform this more dry and laborious duty with

success.

Yet, to confirm all the virtuous associations of the mind; to fix rather than tear away those enchanting hues which invest nature with additional beauty, is at least a more sublime, and not less useful service than the vaunted labours of the cold philosopher!

N° LXXVII.

"Non illa colo calathisve Minervæ Fœmineas assueta manus; sed prælia virgo Dura pati." VIRG.

TO THE RUMINATOR.

SIR,

To a man who has spent a large portion of the early part of his days in the study of ancient, and of his more advanced life in that of modern history; whose imagination is warmed with the heroes of classic literature, and with the splendid achievements to be found in the annals of the feudal times, it is a mortifying idea that so little of that which he has learnt, can be supposed to be true. The painful reflection must often occur to him, that he has wasted his time and labour in turning over many a tedious volume, and has at last stored his memory with events which never took place, or filled his mind with reasonings upon that which had no existence. But though we may justly lament that such is the case, it by no means follows that such studies are useless or unimportant. "History," says Bolingbroke, from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, " is philosophy teaching by examples ;" and there