Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/278

248 whims and conceits, of mock associations, of Midsummer Nights' Dreams. She has her own epithets for its denizens, for the "green little vaulter," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," the "animated torrid zone," of her dainty minstrelsy. Poets of imagination are poets of fancy when they choose to be. Hester Prynne was ever attended by her tricksy Pearl. But many is the poet of fancy who never enters the courts of imagination—a joyous faun indeed, and wanting nothing but a soul.

A large utterance, such as that which Keats bestowed "The grand manner." upon the early gods, is the instinctive voice of the imagination nobly roused and concerned with an heroic theme. There are few better illustrations of this than the cadences and diction of "Hyperion," a torso equal to the finished work of any other English poet after Shakespeare and Milton; perhaps even greater because a torso, for the construction of its fable is not significant, and when Keats produced his effect, he ended the poem as Coleridge ended "Christabel." All qualities which I have thus far termed imaginative contribute to the majesty of its overture:—

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,

Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair.

Forest on forest hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,—

Not so much life as on a summer's day