Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes
of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common
sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference,
cannot be the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice
to either. Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently
of what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest
in them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a
greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from
old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their
consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more
take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects
without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their
preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our
curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these
various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their
stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the
glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning
nothing but a little gray worm: let the poet or the lover of poetry
visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent
moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light.
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