This instance nugatory-Various instances

§ 4. This instance nugatory.
§ 5. Various instances.

As might be expected from his misunderstanding of the faculty, he has given an instance entirely nugatory.It would be difficult to find in Milton a passage in which less power of imagination was shown, than the description of Eden, if, as I suppose, this be the passage meant, at the beginning of the fourth book, in which I can find three expressions only in which this power is shown, the "burnished with golden rind, hung amiable" of the Hesperian fruit, the "lays forth her purple grape" of the vine and the "fringed bank with myrtle crowned," of the lake, and these are not what Stewart meant, but only that accumulation of bowers, groves,cheap oil paintings, lawns, and hillocks, which is not imagination at all, but composition, and that of the commonest kind. Hence, if we take any passage in which there is real imagination, we shall find Stewart's hypothesis not only inefficient and obscure, but utterly inapplicable.
Take one or two at random.

"On the other side, 

Incensed with indignation, Satan stood 

Unterrified, and like a comet burned 

That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge 

In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair 

Shakes pestilence and war." frames for oil paintings

(Note that the word incensed is to be taken in its literal and material sense, set on fire.) What taste or judgment was it that directed this combination? or is there nothing more than taste or judgment here?

"Ten paces huge 

He back recoiled; the tenth on bended knee 

His massy spear upstaid, as if on earth 

Winds under ground, or waters forcing way 

Sidelong had pushed a mountain from his seat 

Half-sunk with all his pines.

"Together both ere the high lawns appeared 

Under the opening eyelids of the morn, 

We drove a field, and both together heard 

What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn.

"Missing thee, I walk unseen 

On the dry smooth shaven green. 

To behold the wandering moon 

Riding near her highest noon, oil paints supplies

Like one that had been led astray, 

Through the heavens' wide pathless way, 

And oft as if her head she bowed

Stooping through a fleecy cloud."

It is evident that Stewart's explanation utterly fails in all these instances, for there is in them no "combination" whatsoever, but a particular mode of regarding the qualities or appearances of a single thing, illustrated and conveyed to us by the image of another; and the act of imagination, observe, is not the selection of this image,buy oil paintings online, but the mode of regarding the object.
But the metaphysician's definition fails yet more utterly, when we look at the imagination neither as regarding, nor combining, but as penetrating.

"My gracious Silence, Hail: 

Wouldst thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home 

That weep'st to see me triumph. Ah! my dear, 

Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, 

And mothers that lack sons."

How did Shakspeare know that Virgilia could not speak? where to buy oil paintings
This knowledge, this intuitive and penetrative perception, is still one of the forms, the highest, of imagination, but there is no combination of images here.