sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton’s grey-fly winding its ‘_sultry_ horn’, which epithet contains the heat of a summer’s day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine; as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made to sympathize with a man’s death; or, in the Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love-- Parea che l’erba le fiorisse intorno, _E d’amor ragionasse quella riva!_ _Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii. or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself; or in the ‘witch element’ of the tragedy of _Macbeth_ and the May-day night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge’s _Christabel_, where the unsuspecting object of the witch’s malignity is bidden to go to bed: Quoth Christabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, _And lay down in her loveliness;--_ a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter _l’s_. I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into the _Friar of Orders Grey_, out of Beaumont and Fletcher: Weep no more, lady, weep no more, Thy sorrow is in vain; _For violets pluck’d the sweetest showers Will ne’er make grow again._ And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as Antony’s likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear’s appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan’s appearance in the horizon, like a fleet ‘hanging in the clouds’; and the comparisons of him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness, is that enchanting one of Shelley’s in the _Adonais_: Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity. I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader’s mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.