the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor’s show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god;—­the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act.  If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second hand.  “There is warrant for it.”  Poets alone have not “such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler reason” can.

      “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
      Are of imagination all compact. 
      One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
      The madman.  While the lover, all as frantic,
      Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. 
      The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
      Doth glance from heav’n to earth, from earth to heav’n;
      And as imagination bodies forth
      The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
      Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
      A local habitation and a name. 
      Such tricks hath strong imagination.”

If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same.  If it is a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality.  Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro:  but was not Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her charms as he?  Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles:  but was not the hero as mad as the poet?  Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by any thing.  This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer’s poetical world has outlived Plato’s philosophical Republic.

Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man’s nature.  We shape things according to our wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind “which ecstacy is very cunning in.”  Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination.