To lift unto my lips the hand of him Who slew my boys.’ He ceased; and there arose Sharp longing in Achilles for his father; And taking Priam by the hand, he gently Put him away; for both shed tears to think Of other times; the one most bitter ones For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness Lay right before Achilles: and the other, For his own father now, and now his friend; And the whole house might hear them as they moan’d. But when divine Achilles had refresh’d His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne, And rais’d the old man by the hand, and took Pity on his grey head and his grey chin. _Iliad_, xxiv. 468. O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, _if he had thought of it_. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes; the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those. We should have been told nothing of the ‘grey chin’, of the house hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling; though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth into their hearts. The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison’s _Cato_ is full of them. Passion unpitied and successless love _Plant daggers in my breast._ I’ve sounded my Numidians, man by man, And find them _ripe for a revolt_. The virtuous Marcia _towers above her sex_.