In these exquisite lines the Faculty of mere Comparison is but little exercised--that of Ideality in a wonderful degree. It is probable that in a similar case the poet we are now reviewing would have formed the face of the Fairy of the "fibrous cloud," her arms of the "pale tinge of even," her eyes of the "fair stars," and her body of the "twilight shadow." Having so done, his admirers would have congratulated him upon his _imagination_, not taking the trouble to think that they themselves could at any moment _imagine_ a Fairy of materials equally as good, and conveying an equally distinct idea. Their mistake would be precisely analogous to that of many a schoolboy who admires the imagination displayed in _Jack the Giant-Killer_, and is finally rejoiced at discovering his own imagination to surpass that of the author, since the monsters destroyed by Jack are only about forty feet in height, and he himself has no trouble in imagining some of one hundred and forty. It will be seen that the Fairy of Shelley is not a mere compound of incongruous natural objects, inartificially put together, and unaccompanied by any _moral_ sentiment--but a being, in the illustration of whose nature some physical elements are used collaterally as adjuncts, while the main conception springs immediately _or thus apparently springs_, from the brain of the poet, enveloped in the moral sentiments of grace, of color, of motion--of the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august--in short of _the ideal_.[9] [Footnote 9: Among things, which not only in our opinion, but in the opinion of far wiser and better men, are to be ranked with the mere prettinesses of the Muse, are the positive similes so abundant in the writings of antiquity, and so much insisted upon by the critics of the reign of Queen Anne.] It is by no means our intention to deny that in the _Culprit Fay_ are passages of a different order from those to which we have objected--passages evincing a degree of imagination not to be discovered in the plot, conception, or general execution of the poem. The opening stanza will afford us a tolerable example. 'Tis the middle watch of a summer's night-- _The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright_ Naught is seen in the vault on high But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky, And the flood which rolls its milky hue A river of light on the welkin blue. The moon looks down on old Cronest, She mellows the shades of his shaggy breast, And seems his huge grey form to throw In a silver cone on the wave below; His sides are broken by spots of shade, By the walnut bough and the cedar made, And through their clustering branches dark _Glimmers and dies_ the fire-fly's spark-- Like starry twinkles that momently break Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.