The
imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from
one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together
to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The
understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of
things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but
according to their relations to one another. The one is a
monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present
excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a
distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate
good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the
other a republican faculty. The principle of poetry is a very anti-
levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It
admits of no medium. It is everything by excess. It rises above the
ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling
appearance. It shows its head turretted, crowned, and crested. Its
front is gilt and blood-stained. Before it 'it carries noise, and
behind it tears'. It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices,
human sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers,
tyrants and slaves its executioners.--'Carnage is its daughter.'
Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the
one above the infinite many, might before right.
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