THE PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION. THE GENERAL ARGUMENT. THE pleasures of the Imagination proceed either from natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moonlight; or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem. In treating of these Pleasures we must begin with the former class, they being original to the other; and nothing more being necessary in order to explain them than a view of our natural inclination toward greatness and beauty, and of those appearances in the world around us to which that inclination is adapted. This is the subject of the First Book of the following Poem. But the Pleasures which we receive from the elegant arts, from music, sculpture, painting, and poetry, are much more various and complicated. In them (besides greatness and beauty, or forms proper to the Imagination) we find interwoven frequent representations of truth, of virtue and vice, of circumstances proper to move us with laughter, or to excite in us pity, fear, and the other passions. These moral and intellectual objects are described in the Second Book, to which the Third properly belongs as an episode, though too large to have been included in it. With the above-mentioned causes of Pleasure, which are universal in the course of human life, and appertain to our higher faculties, many others do generally occur, more limited in their operation, or of an inferior origin; such are the novelty of objects, the association of ideas, affections of the bodily senses, influences of education, natural habits, and the like. To illustrate these, and from the whole to determine the character of a perfect taste, is the argument of the Fourth Book. Hitherto the Pleasures of the Imagination belong to the human species in general; but there are certain particular men whose Imagination is endowed with powers, and susceptible of pleasure, which the generality of mankind never participate: these are the men of genius, destined by Nature to excel in one or other of the arts already mentioned. It is proposed therefore in the last place, to delineate that genius which in some degree appears common to them all, yet with a more peculiar consideration of poetry, inasmuch as poetry is the most extensive of those arts, the most philosophical, and the most useful. THE PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION. BOOK I. MDCCLVII. THE ARGUMENT. The subject proposed. Dedication. The ideas of the Supreme Being the exemplars of all things. The variety of constitution in the minds of men, with its final cause. The general character of a fine Imagination. All the immediate Pleasures of the human Imagination proceed either from greatness or beauty in external objects. The Pleasure from greatness, with its final cause. The natural connexion of beauty with truth and good. The different orders of beauty in different objects. The infinite and all-comprehend *Truth is here taken not in a logical but in a mixed and popular sense, or for what has been called the truth of things, denoting as well their natural and regular condition, as a proper estimate of judgment concerning them. |