Every great conception of Art is held and treated by this faculty.  Every character touched by men like AEschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, is by them held by the heart; and every circumstance or sentence of their being, speaking, or seeming, is seized by a process from within, and is referred to that inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost for a moment; so that every sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens a way down to the heart, and leads us to the very centre of life.  Hence there is in every word set down by the Imagination an awful undercurrent of meaning—­an evidence and shadow upon it of the deep places out of which it has come.

In this it utterly differs from the Fancy, with which it is often confounded.

Fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail.  The Imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt; but in the clear seeing of things beneath, is often impatient of detailed interpretation, being sometimes obscure, mysterious, and abrupt.  Fancy, as she stays at the externals, never feels.  She is one of the hardest hearted of the intellectual faculties; or, rather, one of the most purely and simply intellectual.  She cannot be made serious; no edge tools but she will play with; while the Imagination cannot but be serious—­she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, to smile often!  There is something in the heart of everything, if we can reach it, at which we shall not be inclined to laugh.  Those who have the deepest sympathies are those who pierce deepest, and those who have so pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things, are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy.  The power of an imagination may almost be tested by its accompanying degree of tenderness; thus there is no tenderness like Dante’s, nor any seriousness like his—­such seriousness that he is quite incapable of perceiving that which is commonplace or ridiculous.

Imagination, being at the heart of things, poises herself there, and is still, calm, and brooding; but Fancy, remaining on the outside of things, cannot see them all at once, but runs hither and thither, and round about, to see more and more, bounding merrily from point to point, glittering here and there, but necessarily always settling, if she settle at all, on a point only, and never embracing the whole.  From these simple points she can strike out analogies and catch resemblances, which are true so far as the point from which she looks is concerned, but would be false, could she see through to the other side.  This, however, she does not care to do—­the point of contact is enough for, her; and even if there be a great gap between two things, she will spring from one to the other like an electric spark, and glitter the most brightly in her leaping.  Fancy loves to follow long chains of circumstance from link to link; but the Imagination grasps a link in the middle that implies all the rest, and settles there.