[Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books by Charles W. Eliot]@TWC D-Link bookPrefaces and Prologues to Famous Books PREFACE TO POEMS 11/46
However imbued the surface might be with classical literature, he was a Hebrew in soul; and all things tended in him towards the sublime.
Spenser, of a gentler nature, maintained his freedom by aid of his allegorical spirit, at one time inciting him to create persons out of abstractions; and, at another, by a superior effort of genius, to give the universality and permanence of abstractions to his human beings, by means of attributes and emblems that belong to the highest moral truths and the purest sensations,--of which his character of Una is a glorious example.
Of the human and dramatic Imagination the works of Shakespeare are an inexhaustible source. I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness, I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you Daughters! And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distinguished by this prime quality, whose names I omit to mention; yet justified by recollection of the insults which the ignorant, the incapable, and the presumptuous, have heaped upon these and my other writings, I may be permitted to anticipate the judgment of posterity upon myself, I shall declare (censurable, I grant, if the notoriety of the fact above stated does not justify me) that I have given in these unfavourable times evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its worthiest objects, the external universe, the moral and religious sentiments of Man, his natural affections, and his acquired passions; which have the same ennobling tendency as the productions of men, in this kind, worthy to be holden in undying remembrance. To the mode in which Fancy has already been characterized as the power of evoking and combining, or, as my friend Mr.Coleridge has styled it, 'the aggregative and associative power,' my objection is only that the definition is too general.
To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy; but either the materials evoked and combined are different; or they are brought together under a different law, and for a different purpose. Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of should be susceptible of change in their constitution, from her touch; and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent.
Directly the reverse of these, are the desires and demands of the Imagination.
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