These processes of imagination are carried on either by conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses, and thus enabling it to react upon the mind which hath performed the process, like a new existence.
I pass from the Imagination acting upon an individual image to a consideration of the same faculty employed upon images in a conjunction by which they modify each other.

The Reader has already had a fine instance before him in the passage quoted from Virgil, where the apparently perilous situation of the goat, hanging upon the shaggy precipice, is contrasted with that of the shepherd contemplating it from the seclusion of the cavern in which he lies stretched at ease and in security.

Take these images separately, and how unaffecting the picture compared with that produced by their being thus connected with, and opposed to, each other! As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence, Wonder to all who do the same espy By what means it could thither come, and whence, So that it seems a thing endued with sense, Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.
Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
* * * * * Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth altogether if it move at all.
In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction.

The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison.

After what has been said, the image of the cloud need not be commented upon.
Thus far of an endowing or modifying power: but the Imagination also shapes and _creates_; and how?
By innumerable processes; and in none does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,--alternations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers.