[27] welters,--throws himself about. The abode of Chaucer’s _Reeve_, or Steward, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer: His wonning[28] was full fair upon an heath, With greeny trees yshadowed was his place. [28] dwelling. Every one knows the words of Lear, ‘most _matter-of-fact_, most melancholy.’ Pray, do not mock me; I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upwards: Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly I fear I am not in my perfect mind. It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm in our tears, is drawn out of pain. It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor. With that she dash’d her on the lips, _So dyèd double red: Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled._ There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a sword, or looking out of a window;--Second, that which presents real, but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;--Third, that which combines character and events directly imitated from real life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable parts of the histories of Priam and _Macbeth_, or what may be called natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;--Fourth, that which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as Homer’s gods, and Shakespeare’s witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto’s hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton’s ‘motes that _people_ the sunbeams’; sometimes in concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future, as in the ‘starry Galileo’ of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet ‘murdered’ applied to the yet living victim in Keats’s story from Boccaccio,-- So the two brothers and their _murder’d_ man Rode towards fair Florence;--