CHAPTER XI.
POET'S IMAGERY.
Addison said:—"A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent; a kind eye makes contradiction an assent, &c. This member gives life to every part about us, and I believe the eye is in every part of us."
Dr. Roget says, in his Bridgewater Treatise, that visual impressions are those to which the philosopher resorts for the most apt and perspicuous illustrations of his reasoning; and it also forms the same inexhaustible class of principles from which the poet draws his most pleasing, graphic, and sublime imagery. We shall dare to spend one fleeting moment with those spirits, the poets. They are gone to their reward; but, as good angels, they still minister to us, guide and illuminate; they are around our bed, and watch our sleeping hours; they raise the eye-lid of love and charity; they carol in our path, and summon us to pray; they start in clarion voice, and raise our highest emulations; they whisper gently, and hush our meditations by the tomb and grave of the lovely and the loved. This world owes many of its sunniest hours to them—they never die—
But with the ministers of holy worlds,
They ride through everlasting space in state.
They travel, as great kings and conquerors,
Then yield their fiefdom up on high to God.
Midst principalities and worlds unknown,
Whilst light insufferably bright comes forth,
To mark their radiant way and deck their souls
With glory's rays, whilst countless ages roll.
