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Those who had looked upon the sight,

Passing all human glory,

Saw not the yellow moon,

Saw not the mortal scene,

Heard not the night-wind’s rush,

Heard not an earthly sound,

Saw but the fairy pageant,

Heard but the heavenly strains

That filled the lonely dwelling —

And thus described —

The Fairy’s frame was slight; yon fibrous cloud

That catches but the palest tinge of even,

And which the straining eye can hardly seize

When melting into eastern twilight’s shadow,

Where scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star

That gems the glittering coronet of morn,

Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful,

As that which, bursting from the Fairy’s form,

Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,

Yet with an undulating motion,

Swayed to her outline gracefully.

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 Dr. Drake 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.

The truth is that the just distinction between the fancy and the imagination (and which is still but a distinction of degree) is involved in the consideration of the mystic. We give this as an idea of our own, altogether. We have no authority for our opinion — but do not the less firmly hold it. The term mystic is here employed in the sense of Augustus William Schlegel, and of most other German critics. It is applied by them to that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning, an under or suggestive one. What we vaguely term the moral of any sentiment is its mystic or secondary expression. It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music. This vivifies the air; that spiritualizes the fanciful conception, and lifts it into the ideal.

This theory will bear, we think, the most rigorous tests which can be made applicable to it, and will be acknowledged as tenable by all who are themselves imaginative. If we carefully examine those poems, or portions of poems, or those prose romances, which mankind have been accustomed to designate as imaginative, (for an instinctive feeling leads us to employ properly the term whose full import we have still never been able to define,) it will be seen that all so designated are remarkable for the suggestive character which we have discussed. They are strongly mystic — in the proper sense of the word. We will here only call to the reader’s mind, the Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus; the Inferno of Dante; the Destruction of Numantia by Cervantes; the Comus of Milton; the Auncient Mariner, the Christabel, and the Kubla Khan, of Coleridge; the Nightingale of Keats; and, most especially, the Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the Undine of De La Motte Fouqué. These two latter poems (for we call them