One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister’s wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania scenes from the _Midsummer-Night’s Dream_] will be found in the present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_: Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs; The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers: Her traces of the smallest spider’s web; Her collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, &c. [29] Leigh Hunt’s _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from the English Poets_, 1844. That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton’s _Nymphidia_: This palace standeth in the air, By necromancy placèd there, That it no tempest needs to fear, Which way soe’er it blow it: And somewhat southward tow’rd the noon, Whence lies a way up to the moon, And thence the fairy can as soon Pass to the earth below it. The walls of spiders’ legs are made, Well morticèd and finely laid: He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded: _The windows of the eyes of cats:_ (because they see best at night) And for the roof instead of slats Is cover’d with the skins of bats, _With moonshine that are gilded._ Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet’s _Muse’s Elysium_: