CHAPTER II.

THE LAW OF HARMONY.

THUS far have we arrived in the analysis--that as all pleasure is a concord produced while the mind is in a state of activity, so poetic pleasure is a concord produced while that activity is charged more or less with imagination. The concord therefore will be intensified, imagination having that power. It is the grand harmonist of life; it is the interpreter and peacemaker between mind and matter; it supplies the connecting links between thought and thought; it enters largely into the composition of faith, and, cemented by faith, it forms the pillars and the arches of society. Harmony is its chief end.

Such a concord is of two kinds : it may be imaginary, or it may be only imaginative. An imaginary concord is an agreement between Self and a mental representation of objective reality, as Yarrow yet unvisited was to the mind of Wordsworth. The concord is simply imaginative when our nature harmonizes with reality

itself, something being added, and perhaps also something cancelled by imagination, as when Wordsworth for a summer month gazed upon the sea by Peele Castle, and beheld upon it "the light that never was on sea or land." Imagination enters wholly into the former, into the latter only in part.

Neither of these should be overlooked, and from the stand-point of the poet himself we shall see both. Bacon, however, in his celebrated definition, has taken account only of the former, and indeed from his peculiar point of view, the latter could hardly be seen. Appearing simply as a reader of poesy, and asking himself what he there found, he said that it is a concord wholly imaginary-" a creation, submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind." But those thoughts and feelings which are second-hand, which are wholly representative, which are imaginary, to us who get them by reading, are original in the poet's mind, and spring from contact with reality. Nothing need here be said of the former, the imaginary concord, as it is largely illustrated in the common psychological textbooks: we turn to that imaginative agreement wherein the mind is face to face with reality, and the imagination appears only as an helpmeet.

There are two realities with which man is privileged to hold communion, a spiritual and a sensuous, God and Nature. By widely different powers do we behold these realities: the spirit has no eye for the natural,

and mere sense cannot see the divine. The two powers, however, are connected, and the realities which they regard are bridged by the imagination. Imagination is the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, a musical ladder from sense to spirit.

But while imagination is a fellow-worker both with spirit and with sense, it must evidently have a different manner of working with each. God is always far more than we can think of, whereas Nature does not always come up to our wish. If, therefore, on the one hand, it has to raise nature, on the other, it must rise to God. Bacon says, that while the imagination is employed in adapting the shows of things to the heart's desire, it is the part of reason to buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. But this is only true for the things of sense the province of the imagination in spiritual things is to buckle and bow the mind to embrace these as they are. It has thus always a twofold work to accomplish a subjective as well as an objective raising; in the one case, exalting the realities of sense to our human ideal; in the other, elevating our human thought to a mount from which, as from Carmel and Pisgah, or on which, as on Horeb, Sinai and Tabor, spiritual realities may be witnessed.

If this judgment be well grounded, it will enable us to see the one-sidedness and utter weakness of Johnson's daring assertion, that there can be no religious

poesy; a statement put so plausibly that such men as Christopher North, John Keble, and James Montgomery have thought it worth their while to sift it in detail, and almost word by word; and which, often as it has been thus called in question, has not often been fairly rebutted. Johnson carries all before him, if you but admit that his definition of poetry (the same as that of Bacon) is sufficiently broad; if you admit that poesy always pleases "by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the mind than things themselves afford." The essential part of this definition says, that in poesy a grateful ideal is presented to the mind; it is unessential whether that ideal be more or less than reality. In saying that it must always be more, Johnson begs the whole question; and if this be granted, all is lost; for truly Omnipotence cannot be exalted, Infinity cannot be amplified, Perfection cannot be improved. Reply, however, that religious poesy seeks not to heighten the Divine, but to raise our minds to the perception of the Divine, and he in turn is foiled. His theory is thus at fault à priori; and à posteriori it fares no better. For although it be most true that pure spirit can easily as a sunbeam soar to altitudes which, from want of buoyant air, the wings of imagination can never approach, yet whenever it ventures to employ language (and Johnson would most assuredly not allow that worship ceases to be spiritual when it ceases to be silent) it must evidently have descended into that cloudy region which

belongs to imagination even more than to itself; and there, what wonder if the shiny visions of spirit, and the lark-like music of fancy, cross, blend and thrill through each other, as living warp and woof. A distinction however must be noticed between the poetry of heathen worship and that of Christian, since according as our ideal happens to be above or below reality, the work of imagination will be more or less essential. With heathen poets the imagination runs riot and enters the soul of the most spiritual conceptions; for with the most intense anthropomorphism they adapted the nature of their gods to their own desires. The Christian poets endeavour to reach an uncreated God and allow imagination go with them only to the door.

SENSUOUS Concords-which we must run over very rapidly-may be classed under the five senses. Some philosophers would make six, seven, and even eight senses; but the common reckoning is the most trustworthy.

[Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most poetical; and because it requires most imagination. We do not simply listen to sounds, but whether they be articulate or inarticulate, we are constantly translating them into the language of sight, with which we are better acquainted; and this is a work of the imaginative faculty.

Of seeing, it is nothing beyond a truism to observe