_Mistake on this Point._--I must notice in this connection, however, a mistake into which some have fallen in regard to this matter. The simple description of a scene in nature, just as it is, is not properly a work of the imagination. It is simply perception or memory that is thus exercised, along with judgment and artistic power of expression. Imagination gives not the actual, but the ideal. She never satisfies herself with an exact copy. The mere portrait painter, however skillful, is not in the highest sense an artist. The painter, mentioned by Wayland, who copied the wing of the butterfly for the wing of the Sylph, was not, in so doing, exercising his imagination, but only his power of imitation. So, too, when Walter Scott gives us, in the cave of Denzel, a precise description of some spot which he has seen, even to the very plants and flowers that grow among the rocks, that scene, however pleasing and life-like, is not properly a creation of his own imagination; it is a description of the actual, and not a conception of the ideal. Much that is included under the general title of works of the imagination is not properly the production of that faculty. Coleridge has made essentially the same remark, that in what is called a work of imagination, much is simple narration, much the filling up of the outline, and not to be attributed to that faculty. _The Student of Nature not a mere Copyist._--The true study of nature, is not to observe simply that we may copy what she presents, but rather to gather materials on which our own conceptive power may work, and which it may fashion after its own designs into new combinations and results of beauty. Nature, too, is full of hints and suggestions which a discerning mind, and an eye practised to the beautiful, will not fail to catch and improve. It is only when we do this, when we begin, in fact, to depart from, and go beyond the actual, that we exercise the imagination. _Difference illustrated by an Example._--The difference between simple description, and the creations of the conceptive faculty, may be shown by reference to a single example: "The twilight hours, like birds, flew by, As lightly and as free; Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand in the sea; For every wave, with dimpled cheek That leaped upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there." The quiet stillness of the evening, the reflection of the stars in the sea, are the two simple ideas which enter into this beautiful stanza. They would have been faithfully and fully expressed, so far as regards all the perfections of exact description, by the simple propositions which follow: "The evening hours passed swiftly and silently; many stars appeared in the sky, and each was reflected in the sea."