The shape which the imaginative faculty will take is modified by the force of the other qualities with which it is coördinated in the mind. If the moral sense predominates, the man becomes a reformer, or a fanatic, and his imagination gets itself uttered in his life. Bunyan would have been nothing but a fanatic, if he had not been luckily shut up in Bedford jail, alone with his imagination, which, unable to find vent in any other way, possessed and tortured him till it had wrung the “Pilgrim’s Progress” out of him--a book the nearest to a poem, without being one, that ever was written. Uniting itself with the sense of form, Imagination makes a sculptor; with those of form and color, a painter; with those of time and tune, a musician. For in itself it is dumb, and can find expression only through the help of some other faculty. Imagination _plus_ the poetic sense is poesy, _minus_ the poetic sense it is science, though it may clothe itself in verse. To those who are familiar with Dr. Donne’s verses, I need only mention his name as a proof of my last position. He solves problems in rhyme, that is all. Shakspeare was so charged with the highest form of the poetic imagination, as some persons are with electricity, that he could not point his finger at a word without a spark of it going out of him. I will illustrate it by an example taken at random from him. When Romeo is parting from Juliet, Shakspeare first projects his own mind into Romeo, and then, as Romeo becomes so possessed with the emotion of the moment that his words take color from it, all nature is infected and is full of _partings_. He says: But look what _envious_ streaks Do lace the _severing_ clouds. Shakspeare’s one hundred and thirteenth sonnet was here also quoted in illustration. The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, is the dramatic, of which Shakspeare must always stand for the only definition. Next is the narrative imagination, where the poet forces his own personal consciousness upon us and makes our senses the slaves of his own. Of this kind Dante’s “Divina Commedia” is the type. Below this are the poems in which the imagination is more diffused; where the impression we receive is rather from _mass_ than from particulars; where single lines are not so strong in themselves as in forming integral portions of great sweeps of verse; where effects are produced by allusion and suggestion, by sonorousness, by the use of names which have a traditional poetic value. Of this kind Milton is the type. Lastly, said Mr. Lowell, I would place in a class by themselves those poets who have properly no imagination at all, but only a pictorial power. These we may call the imaginary poets, writers who give us images of things that neither they nor we believe in or can be deceived by, like pictures from a magic lantern. Of this kind are the Oriental poems of Southey, which show a knowledge of Asiatic mythologies, but are not livingly mythologic.