Where the imagination is found in combination with great acuteness of intellect, we have its secondary or prose form. Lord Bacon is an example of it. Sir Thomas Browne is a still more remarkable one--a man who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman except Shakspeare. Fancy is a frailer quality than Imagination, and cannot breathe the difficult air of the higher regions of intuition. In combination with Sentiment it produces poetry; with Experience, wit. The poetical faculty is in closer affinity with Imagination; the poetical temperament with Fancy. Contrast Milton with Herrick or Moore. In illustration Mr. Lowell quoted from Marvell, the poet of all others whose fancy hints always at something beyond itself, and whose wit seems to have been fed on the strong meat of humor. As regards _man_, Fancy takes delight in life, manners, and the result of culture, in what may be called _Scenery_; Imagination is that mysterious something which we call Nature--the unfathomed base on which Scenery rests and is sustained. Fancy deals with feeling; Imagination with passion. I have sometimes thought that Shakspeare, in the scene of the “Tempest,” intended to typify the isle of _Man_, and in the characters, some of the leading qualities or passions which dwell in it. It is not hard to find the Imagination in Prospero, the Fancy in Ariel, and the Understanding in Caliban; and, as he himself was the poetic imagination incarnated, is it considering too nicely to think that there is a profound personal allusion in the breaking of Prospero’s wand and the burying of his book to the nature of that man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on mortgage, and leaning over the gate to chat and chaffer with his neighbors? I think that every man is conscious at times that it is only his borders, his seaboard, that is civilized and subdued. Behind that narrow strip stretches the untamed domain, shaggy, unexplored, of the natural instincts. Is not this so? Then we can narrow our definition yet farther, and say that Fancy and Wit appear to the artificial man; Imagination and Humor to the natural man. Thus each of us in his dual capacity can at once like Chaucer and Pope, Butler and Jean Paul, and bury the hatchet of one war of tastes. And now, finally, what is the secret of the great poet’s power over us? There is something we love better than love, something that is sweeter to us than riches, something that is more inspiring to us than success--and that is the imagination of them. No woman was ever loved enough, no miser was ever rich enough, no ambitious man ever successful enough, but in imagination. Every desire of the heart finds its gratification in the poet because he speaks always imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers. We are the always-welcome guests of his ennobling words.