The true reception of whatever is poetical or imaginative presupposes a more exalted, or, at least, excited, condition of mind both in the poet and the reader. To take an example from daily life, look at the wholly diverse emotions with which a partizan and an indifferent person read the same political newspaper. The one thinks the editor a very sound and moderate person whose opinion is worth having on a practical question; the other wonders to see one very respectable citizen drawn as a Jupiter Tonans, with as near an approach to real thunderbolts as printer’s ink and paper will concede, and another, equally respectable and a member of the same church, painted entirely black, with horns, hoofs, and tail. The partizan is in the receptive condition just spoken of; the indifferent occupies the solid ground of the common sense. To illustrate the superiority of the poetic imagination over the prosaic understanding, Mr. Lowell quoted a story told by Le Grand in a note to one of his “Fabliaux.” A sinner lies dying, and an angel and a fiend, after disputing the right to his soul, agree to settle the affair by a throw of dice. The fiend gets the first chance, and the fatal cubes come up--two sixes! He chuckles and rubs his claws, for everybody knows that no higher number is possible. But the angel thinks otherwise, throws, and, behold, a six and seven! And thus it is, that when the understanding has done its best, when it has reached, as it thinks, down to the last secret of music and meaning that language is capable of, the poetical sense comes in with its careless miracle, and gets one more point than there are in the dice. Imagination is not necessarily concerned with poetic expression. Nothing can be more poetical than the lines of Henry More the Platonist: What doth move The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear? The thrush or lark, that mounting high above, Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn, Heavily hanging in the dewy morn. But compare it with Keats’ Ruth, when sick for home, She stood in tears amid the _alien_ corn. The imagination has touched that word “alien,” and in it we see the field through Ruth’s eyes, as _she_ looked round on the hostile spikes, and not through those of the poet. Imagination enters more or less into the composition of all _great_ minds, all minds that have what we call _breadth_ as distinguished from mere force or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato and Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, in fanatics like George Fox, and in reformers like Luther.