If an inquiry be instituted into the magic influence of a beautiful diction, it will always be found that it consists in this happy relation between external freedom and internal necessity. The principal features that contribute to this freedom of the imagination are the _individualizing_ of objects and the figurative or _inexact expression_ of a thing; the former employed to give force to its sensuousness, the latter to produce it where it does not exist. When we express a species or kind by an individual, and portray a conception in a single case, we remove from fancy the chains which the understanding has placed upon her and give her the power to act as a creator. Always grasping at completely determinate images, the imagination obtains and exercises the right to complete according to her wish the image afforded to her, to animate it, to fashion it, to follow it in all the associations and transformations of which it is capable. She may forget for a moment her subordinate position, and act as an independent power, only self-directing, because the strictness of the inner concatenation has sufficiently guarded against her breaking loose from the control of the understanding. An inexact or figurative expression adds to the liberty, by associating ideas which in their nature differ essentially from one another, but which unite in subordination to the higher idea. The imagination adheres to the concrete object, the understanding to this higher idea, and thus the former finds movement and variety even where the other verifies a most perfect continuity. The conceptions are developed according to the _law of necessity_, but they pass before the imagination according to the _law of liberty_. Thought remains the same; the medium that represents it is the only thing that changes. It is thus that an eloquent writer knows how to extract the most splendid order from the very centre of anarchy, and that he succeeds in erecting a solid structure on a constantly moving ground, on the very torrent of imagination.