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A new poem from Moore calls to mind that critical opinion respecting him which had its origin, we believe, in the dogmatism of Coleridge — we mean the opinion that he is essentially the poet of fancy — the term being employed in contradistinction to imagination. “The fancy,’’ says the author of the “Auncient Mariner,’’ in his Biographia Literaria, “the fancy combines, the imagination creates.’’ And this was intended, and has been received, as a distinction. If so at all, it is one without a difference; without even a difference of degree. The fancy as nearly creates as the imagination; and neither creates in any respect. All novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed; and this point is susceptible of the most positive demonstration — see the Baron de Bielfeld, in his Premiers Traits de L’Erudition Universelle, 1767. It will be said, perhaps, that we can imagine a griffin, and that a griffin does not exist. Not the griffin certainly, but its component parts. It is a mere compendium of known limbs and features — of known qualities. Thus with all which seems to be new — which appears to be a creation of intellect. It is re-soluble into the old. The wildest and most vigorous effort of mind cannot stand the test of this analysis.

We might make a distinction, of degree, between the fancy and the imagination, in saying that the latter is the former loftily employed. But experience proves this distinction to be unsatisfactory. What we feel and know to be fancy, will be found still only ­fanciful, whatever be the theme which engages it. It retains its idiosyncrasy under all circumstances. No subject exalts it into the ideal. We might exemplify this by reference to the writings of one whom our patriotism, rather than our judgment, has elevated to a niche in the Poetic Temple which he does not becomingly fill, and which he cannot long uninterruptedly hold. We allude to the late Dr. Rodman Drake, whose puerile abortion, “The Culprit Fay,’’ we examined, at some length, in a critique elsewhere; proving it, we think, beyond all question, to belong to that class of the pseudo-ideal, in dealing with which we find ourselves embarrassed between a kind of half-consciousness that we ought to admire, and the certainty that we do not. Dr. Drake was employed upon a good subject — at least it is a subject precisely identical with those which Shakspeare was wont so happily to treat, and in which, especially, the author of “Lilian’’ has so wonderfully succeeded. But the American has brought to his task a mere fancy, and has grossly failed in doing what many suppose him to have done — in writing an ideal or imaginative poem. There is not one particle of the true [[Greek text:]] poihsiV [[:Greek text]] about “The Culprit Fay.’’ We say that the subject, even at its best points, did not aid Dr. Drake in the slightest degree. He was never more than fanciful. The passage, for example, chiefly cited by his admirers, is the account of the “Sylphid Queen;’’ and to show the difference between the false and true ideal, we collated, in the review just alluded to, this, the most admired passage, with one upon a similar topic by Shelley. We shall be pardoned for repeating here, as nearly as we remember them, some words of what we then said.

The description of the Sylphid Queen runs thus:

But oh, how fair the shape that lay

Beneath a rainbow bending bright;

She seemed to the entranced Fay,

The loveliest of the forms of light;

Her mantle was the purple rolled

At twilight in the west afar;

‘Twas tied with threads of dawning gold,

And buttoned with a sparkling star.

Her face was like the lily roon

That veils the vestal planet’s hue;

Her eyes two beamlets from the moon

Set floating in the welkin blue. ­

Her hair is like the sunny beam,

And the diamond gems which round it gleam

Are the pure drops of dewy even

That ne’er have left their native heaven.

In theQueen