Page 221, col. 2, line 11, for "enimici," read, inimici. Page 222, col. 1, line 42, for "fills," read, trets. Page 222, col. 2, line 10, for " Guéroun ére," read, Guéronniére. Page 412, col. 2, line 18, for pistensosi," read, pisteusosi. THE BRITISH CONTROVERSIALIST. Rhetoric. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE ART OF REASONING." No. XIII.-THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY. "TIME is like a ship that never anchors." "Dum loquimur, fugerit invida ætas.' The old year has "gone to his death-bed," and is mingled with the unrecallable. Now is the time for serious reflection-for taking counsel with our own souls. Have we remembered that "While we give the unguarded hour To wine and revelry in Pleasure's bower, The noiseless foot of Time steals swiftly by, Have we reflected with due care upon the great truth, that "Time is eternity, Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile," or all that is ruinous to human souls? Solemn consideration! May we resolve wisely regarding the coming time, and act worthily in it! Be ours the motto inscribed on the tombstone at St. Gilgen:-"Look not mournfully into the past: it comes not back. Wisely improve the present: it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear, and with a manly heart." "Labour, then, Fellow men; Up, brave hearts, try again! Ours is no struggle for might or domain; Aiming at purer life, Front we all hardships, all trial, all pain."' Hath not the poet spoken a solemn truth, to which all earnest men should listen, when he uses these words? "Say, why was man so eminently raised Above the vast creation; why ordained • "Even while we converse envious age hastens on." + "Dum bibimus, dum serta, unguenta, puellas Poscimus, obrepit nou intellecta senectus."—Juvenal, Satire 9. B Through life and death to dart his piercing eye, As on a boundless theatre, to run To chase each partial purpose from his breast- Of nature calls him to his high reward- May we so labour that this reward may be ours! May we, with Horace, be able to say "Quid verum atque decens curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum: Condo et compono quæ mox depromere possim. Ac ne forte roges, quo me duce, quo lare tuter; Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri."-Epis. i. 11-14.* Let us engage in the search after wisdom and virtue with our whole souls earnestly, and strive to live up to the grand ideal of human life. May we avoid "The mornlit revel and the shameless mate The tabled hues of darkness and of blood The published bosom and the crowning smile The cup excessive; and if aught there be and carefully train ourselves in the belief "That there is nought on earth worth being known, Save God and our own souls." As a means of furthering this wise and moral mind-culture, we purpose devoting the present paper to a consideration of the nature, powers, and pleasures, of "the imaginative faculty." We believe that the present season is appropriate to the discussion of this topic, because we think that it is possible to prove that the imaginative faculty is able to supply the purest and most refined gratification which the human soul is susceptible of enjoying-that the pleasure which it is able to communicate as far transcends those derivable from "animal desires, delights, and loves," as the appearance of a sister newly verging into womanhood surpasses in loveliness a "dry, ungainly skeleton." It is not often we indulge in reading homilies or assume the voice of the preacher; but we could not banish these thoughts from our mind as we sat reflecting on the topic now to occupy our attention, and they forced themselves into utterance. May reader and writer be fully impressed with the solemnity of *The above passage may be thus translated:-" I study and inquire what is true and moral, and am wholly engaged in this; I lay up and collect rules which I am afterwards able to act upon; and lest, perchance, you should ask me under what leader, or into what school, I have entered as a pupil, I answer, I am inclined to resign myself implicitly to the sayings of no master." such thoughts — thoughts which should be recurrent at seasons like this, when a new branch is added to our "tree of life." In the immediately preceding papers of this series we have treated of the most important of those laws which are applicable to every species of composition. Such evidence as seemed to us to prove that thought and speech are correlates have been presented to you; the necessity of acquiring dexterity in the accurate use of language has been advocated; the laws which ought to regulate our efforts at thought-expression have been laid down and illustrated; and the means by which exactitude and harmony of diction have been, so far as in us lay, consistently with the space at our disposal, demonstrated to be not only reasonable, but practicable. We are desirous now of entering into the consideration of those departments of Rhetorical study which concern themselves with the higher developments of thought, viz., those which relate to "the poetic faculty in man." Our The external universe has been created "all beauty to the eye and music to the ear," "and truly a volume of nature it is, whose author and writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much as well know the alphabet thereof, with its words, sentences, and grand descriptive pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through solar systems and thousands of years?" And yet to read this book is a necessity of our nature. present state of being is educative; and the meaning contained in "the thick-crowded, inextricably-intertwisted hieroglyphic writings" which appear around us, it is our business to discover. Reason and Imagination are the two eyes which we employ in these investigations. Poetry is the result of the conjoined operation of the Imagination and the Emotions; Science is the product of the combined labours of the Imagination and the Intellect. Poetry, in its highest development, is the synthesis of the good, the true, and the beautiful; Science concerns itself solely with the true. Science is the realization of nature; Poetry the idealization of it. The Imagination is "ever the mother of deep truth." The world is emblematic, and the human soul is so constituted that it yearns to discover the analogies which subsist between the spiritual and the material. "In nature's frame the great Artificer portrays His own immense idea;" and the grand problem given to the mentality is, from the data of sensation to discover the laws of being and destiny. Sensations are the known quantities through which the mind, by a peculiar calculus of its own, endeavours to acquire a knowledge of those allimportant topics. Man is primarily a sensuous being, but he cannot long continue so. Sensations are only the nutriment of thought. It is Imagination which sheds upon the sensuous that "heavenly alchemy" by which it becomes the glory-hued symbolism of spiritual truth. This is the power by which we are enabled to turn "The sunny side of things to human eyes." It "extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys;" while on the external world, and the objectivities of which it is com posed, it throws "The gleam The light that never was on land or shore The inspiration and the poet's dream." To analyze the operations of the imagination is a work of considerable difficulty, nor do we flatter ourselves that we are capable of overcoming it; but great ends are only attained by being greatly daring. That power which "Adds a precious seeing to the eye," and is the birth-source of those delight-giving aspirations which develop themselves into the sister graces of the soul-Poetry, Painting, and Music-has not heretofore been demarcated with sufficient philosophic accuracy from other though kindred mental faculties. The word Imagination is employed to signify-1st. That capacity of the intellect which calls before it any of those sensations which may at any time have impinged the sensorium and passed into the perceptual treasury; i. e., instead of concep tion, or voluntary memory. 2nd. The power of conjoining fantastic notions capable of stirring and exciting the mind-Fancy harlequinading in the dress of Wit. 3rd. Fancywho is only the younger sister of Imagination— "A violet in the youth of primy Nature; Forward, not permanent-sweet, not lasting; 4th (and accurately). The faculty from which all poetry proceeds-that marvellous conjunction of perceptive acuteness, liveliness of memory, correctness of judgment, purity of taste, and readiness of abstraction and generalization, which enables man to cull the fairest portions of individual and separate existences-to blend these together and colligate their various parts into new wholes more accordant with the ideal of perfection which arises in the mind on the contemplation of those differing objects. Imagination has been truly and accurately described as "a complex power." It includes in its signification an exquisite nicety of sensational activity, to convey to the perceptivity a critically exact representation of the without—a just and delicate extension of the capacity of perception— a ready, powerful, comprehensive, and accurate memory, that the objects of perception may be promptly placed at the service of an equally-balanced and energetically-acting judgment—a judiciously-selective taste, precise in its notions of qualities and circumstances-well-practised powers of abstraction, and a capacity of combining all these together with skill, carefully appropriated and adapted to the emotional excitement which agitates the mind. Thus it will be seen that "we do not merely perceive objects, and conceive or remember them simply as they were; but we have the power of combining them in various new assemblages-of forming at our will, with a sort of delegated omnipotence, not a single universe merely, but a new and varied universe with every succession of our thoughts. The materials out of which we form them exist in every mind, but they exist only as the stones exist, shapeless in the quarry, that require little more than mechanical labour to erect them into common dwellings, but that rise into palaces and temples only at the command of genius."* The most glowing and beatific idealisms with which poetry surprises and delights us "Brown's Philosophy of the Human Mind," lect. xlii. |