... our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the inchanted Hero of a Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams; but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastic Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart. The tendency among critics to use this sort of imagery, or words suggestive of it, when writing of the _fancy_ and the _imagination_, rapidly increased. Dryden had already distinguished the “fairy” way of writing, and from Addison’s time we constantly hear writers and their art referred to in terms of _fairyland_, _enchantments_, _magic_, _spells_, _wands_,... Shakespeare, we are told by one writer, is “a more powerful magician than his own Prospero”. “The world is worn out to us,” wrote Young. “Where are its formerly sweet delusions, its airy castles, and glittering spires?” And five years later he assured us that “the pen of an original writer, like Armida’s wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring”. But as the Romantic impulse grew older and crystallized into a philosophy—when the child which had germinated, as feeling, among the ignorant many who spoke the Romance languages, after passing through its Elizabethan adolescence, achieved self-conscious maturity, as thought, among the learned few who were familiar with the complicated literary languages of modern Europe—the need was felt for some way of distinguishing what were merely “sweet delusions” from the more eternal productions of the Romantic spirit. And this Coleridge achieved by his famous distinction between _fancy_ and _imagination_. _Fancy_, since his day, has meant rather the power of inventing illustrative imagery—the playful adornment, as it were, of Nature; but _imagination_ is the power of creating from within forms which themselves become a part of Nature—“Forms”, as Shelley put it, more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.