Of the "Pleasures of Imagination," it is not necessary to say a great deal. A poem that has been so widely circulated, so warmly praised, so frequently quoted and imitated--the whole of which nearly a man like Thomas Brown has quoted in the course of his lectures--must possess no ordinary merit. Its great beauty is its richness of description and language--its great fault is its obscurity; a beauty and a fault closely connected together, even as the luxuriance of a tropical forest implies intricacy, and its lavish loveliness creates a gloom. His attempt to express Plato's philosophy in blank verse is not always successful. Perhaps prose might better have answered his purpose in expressing the awfully sublime thought of the "archetypes of all things existing in God." We know that in certain objects of nature--in certain rocks, for instance (such as Coleridge describes in his "Wanderings of Cain")-- there lie silent prefigurations and aboriginal types of artificial objects, such as ships, temples, and other orders of architecture; and it is so also in certain shells, woods, and even in clouds. How interesting and beautiful those painted prophecies of nature, those quiet hieroglyphics of God, those mystic letters, which, unlike those on the Babylonian wall, do _not_, "Careering shake, And blaze IMPATIENT to be read," but bide calmly the time when their artificial archetypes shall appear, and the "wisdom" in them shall be "justified" in these its children! So, according to Plato, comparing great to small things, there lay in the Divine mind the archetypes of all that was to be created, with this important difference, that they lay in God _spiritually_ and consciously. How poetical and how solemn to approach, under the guidance of this thought, and gaze on the mind of God as on an ancient awful mirror; and even as in a clear lake we behold the forms of the surrounding scenery reflected from the white strip of pebbled shore up to the gray scalp of the mountain summit, and tremble as we look down on the "skies of a far nether world," on an inverted sun, and on snow unmelted amidst the water; so to see the entire history of man, from the first glance of life in the eye of Adam, down to the last sparkle of the last ember of the general conflagration, lying silently and inverted there--how sublime, but at the same time how bewildering and how appalling! Our readers will find, in the "Pleasures of Imagination," an expansion--perhaps they may think it a dilution--of this Platonic idea.