It is more than probable that from among ten readers of the _Culprit Fay_, nine would immediately pronounce it a poem betokening the most extraordinary powers of imagination, and of these nine, perhaps five or six, poets themselves, and fully impressed with the truth of what we have already assumed, that Ideality is indeed the soul of the Poetic Sentiment, would feel embarrassed between a half-consciousness that they _ought_ to admire the production, and a wonder that they _do not_. This embarrassment would then arise from an indistinct conception of the results in which Ideality is rendered manifest. Of these results some few are seen in the _Culprit Fay_, but the greater part of it is utterly destitute of any evidence of imagination whatever. The general character of the poem will, we think, be sufficiently understood by any one who may have taken the trouble to read our foregoing compendium of the narrative. It will be there seen that what is so frequently termed the imaginative power of this story, lies especially--we should have rather said is thought to lie--in the passages we have quoted, or in others of a precisely similar nature. These passages embody, principally, mere specifications of qualities, of habiliments, of punishments, of occupations, of circumstances &c., which the poet has believed in unison with the size, firstly, and secondly with the nature of his Fairies. To all which may be added specifications of other animal existences (such as the toad, the beetle, the lance-fly, the fire-fly and the like) supposed also to be in accordance. An example will best illustrate our meaning upon this point--we take it from page 20. He put his acorn helmet on; It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down: The corslet plate that guarded his breast Was once the wild bee's golden vest; His cloak of a thousand mingled dyes, Was formed of the wings of butterflies; His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen, Studs of gold on a ground of green;[6] And the quivering lance which he brandished bright Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in fight. [Footnote 6: Chesnut color, or more slack, Gold upon a ground of black. _Ben Jonson_.] We shall now be understood. Were any of the admirers of the _Culprit Fay_ asked their opinion of these lines, they would most probably speak in high terms of the _imagination_ they display. Yet let the most stolid and {331} the most confessedly unpoetical of these admirers only try the experiment, and he will find, possibly to his extreme surprise, that he himself will have no difficulty whatever in substituting for the equipments of the Fairy, as assigned by the poet, other equipments equally comfortable, no doubt, and equally in unison with the preconceived size, character, and other qualities of the equipped. Why we could accoutre him as well ourselves--let us see.