LECTURE ON IMAGINATION.
1848.
Poetical composition is usually and rightly regarded as the intellectual province over which the imagination more particularly presides. The possession of this faculty is essential to the enjoyment as well as to the production of poetry. When developed in a high degree, it renders him who is gifted with it a poet, while it enables those who possess it in a lower degree to appreciate and relish the strains which they could not have themselves composed.
Now, in order to reach some decisive principle by which we may determine when the imagination is exercised properly and when it is exercised perversely, I must raise a somewhat singular question, a question which you may at first sight regard as extravagant. But, perhaps, with a little patience we may be led by our question to find what we want, viz., a standard which shall decide between the right and the wrong employment of the imagination as it displays itself
