which happened a few hours before, are remembered, wher there is total forgetfulness of what happened a few days before.

In the fifth place, our successive feelings are associated more closely, as each has coexisted less with other feelings. The song, which we have never heard but from one person, can scarcely be heard again by us, without recalling that person to our memory; but there is obviously much less chance of this particular suggestion, if we have heard the same air and words frequently sung by others.

In the sixth place, the influence of the primary laws of suggestion is greatly modified by original constitutional differences, whether these are to be referred to the mind itself, or to varieties of bodily temperament. Such constitutional differences affect the primary laws in two ways,-first, by augmenting and extending the influence of all of them, as in the varieties of the general power of remembering, so observable in different individuals. Secondly, they modify the influence of the primary laws, by giving greater proportional vigour to one set of tendencies of suggestion than to another. It is in this modification of the suggesting principle, and the peculiar suggestions to which it gives rise, that I conceive the chief part, or I may say, the whole of what is truly called genius, to consist. We have already seen, that the primary tendencies of suggestion are of various species, some, for example, arising from mere analogy, others from direct contiguity or nearness in time or place of the very objects themselves, and it is this difference of the prevailing tendency, as to these two species of suggestions, which I conceive to constitute all that is inventive in genius ;-invention consisting in the suggestions of analogy, as opposed to the suggestions of grosser contiguity.

In the mind of one poet, for example, the conception of his subject awakens only such images, as he had previously seen combined with it in the works of others; and he is thus fated, by his narrow and unvarying range of suggestion, only to add another name to the eternal list of imitators. In a poetic mind of a higher order, the conception of this very subject cannot exist for a moment, without awakening, by the different tendency of the suggesting principle, groups of images which never before had existed in similar combination; and instead of being an imitator, he becomes a great model, for the imitation of others. The prevailing suggestions of the one, in his trains of thought, are according to the relation of analogy, which is almost infinite; the prevailing suggestions of the other are those of contiguity of the images themselves, which, by its very nature, admits of no novelty, and gives only tran

scripts of the past. To tame down original genius, therefore, to mere imitation, and to raise the imitator to some rank of genius, it would be necessary only to reverse these simple tendencies. The fancy of the one would then, in the suggestions of mere contiguity, lose all that variety which had distinguished it, and would present only such combinations of images, as had before occurred to it, in similar order, in the works of former writers ;-the fancy of the other, on acquiring the peculiar tendency to suggestions of analogy, would become instantly creative,--new forms, of external beauty, or of internal passion, would crowd upon his mind, by their analogy to ideas and feelings previously existing; and this single change of the direction of the suggesting principle would be sufficient to produce all those wonders, which the poet of imagination ascribes to the influence of inspiring genii,

"who conduct

The wandering footsteps of the youthful bard

New to their springs and shades; who touch his ear
With finer sounds; who heighten to his eye
The bloom of nature; and before him turn
The gayest, happiest attitudes,† of things."

Even in all those "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," and those boundless stores of imagery, which a great poet lavishes with magnificent profusion, there is probably not a single image which has not been an object of our own perception, and therefore capable of being again awakened in our mind, in conformity with the primary laws of suggestion; nay, there is perhaps not a single image which has not repeatedly been thus awakened in our mind. It is not, therefore, in consequence of any more copious store of images, that an original poet is enabled to group them in more beautiful variety, since the forms which he combines are stored in the memory of all, and are common to him with the dullest versifier; nor is it from any superior tenacity of general memory, that they rise more readily to his imagination. They might rise to both minds, and they do rise to both minds, but they rise on different occasions, in consequence, merely, of the different directions of the suggesting principle. How many are there, who have seen an old oak, half leafless, amid the younger trees of the forest, and who are therefore capable of remembering it when they think of the forest itself, or of events that happened there! But it is to the mind of Lucan that it rises, by analogy, on the conception of a veteran chief-as in that exqui• Your, Orig.

site simile, which, in constrasting the heroes of Pharsalia, he uses to illustrate the character of Pompey, and the veneration still paid to that ancient greatness, of which little more was left than the remembrance of its glory ;

"Stat magni nominis umbra

Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro
Exuvias veteres populi, sacrataque gestans
Dona ducum; nec jam validis radicibus hærens
Pondére fixa suo est; nudosque per aëra ramos
Effundens, trunco, non frondibus, efficit umbram;
At quamvis primo nutet casura sub Euro

Tot circum sylvæ firmo se robore tollant
Sola tamen colitur."

The inventions of poetic genius, then, are the suggestions of analogy, the prevailing suggestions of common minds, are those of mere contiguity; and it is this difference of the occasions of suggestion, not of the images suggested, which forms the distinctive superiority of original genius. Any one, who has had the pleasure of reading the beautiful simile, which I have quoted to you from the Pharsalia, may, on the sight of a decaying oak, feel immediately the relation of analogy which this majestic trunk, still lifting as proudly to the storm, and spreading as widely its leafless arms, bears to the decay of human grandeur, more venerable, perhaps, in its very feebleness, than in all the magnificence of its power. The mind of every one, therefore, is capable of the suggestion of the one analogous object by the other, as much as the mind of Lucan. The only difference is, that, to produce this suggestion in a common mind, it was necessary, previously, to make the one conception successive, in point of time, to the other, to produce, in short, a proximity of the very images that could be obtained only by a perusal of the verses, in which the images are immediately proximate :-while the suggestion, in the mind of the original author, though perhaps not more clear and perfect, than it was afterwards to be, in the memory of many of those who have read the simile, and felt its justness and beauty, differed, notwithstanding, in this most important respect, that in him, it did not require such previous contiguity to produce the suggestion, but arose, by its mere analogy, in consequence of the greater tendency of the inventive mind to suggestions of this particular class.

Copious reading, and a retentive memory, may give to an individual of very humble talent, a greater profusion of splendid images, than existed in any one of the individual minds, on whose sublime conceptions he has dwelt, till they have be

* Pharsalia, Lib. I. v. 135–143.

come, in one sense of the word, his own. There is scarcely an object which he perceives, that may not now bring instantly before him the brightest imagery; but, for this suggestion, however instant and copious, previous coexistence, or succession of the images, was necessary; and it is his memory, therefore, which we praise. If half the conceptions which are stored in his mind, and which rise in it now in its trains of thought by simple suggestion, as readily as they arose in like manner in accordance with some train of thought in the mind of their original authors, had but risen by the suggestion of analogy, as they now arise by the suggestion of former proximity, what we call memory, which is, in truth, only the same suggestion in different circumstances, would have been fancy, or genius; and his country and age would have had another name to transmit to the reverence and the emulation of the ages that are to follow.

It is the same with inventive genius in the sciences and the severer arts, which does not depend on the mere knowledge of all the phenomena previously observed, or of all the applications of them that have been made to purposes of art, but chiefly on the peculiar tendency of the mind to suggest certain analogous ideas, in successions, different from those ordinary successions of grosser contiguity, which occur to common minds. He may, perhaps, be called a philosopher, who knows accurately what others know, and produces, with the same means which others employ, the same effects which they produce. But he alone has philosophic genius, to whose speculations analogous effects suggest analogous causes, and who contrives practically, by the suggestions of analogy, to produce new effects, or to produce the same effects by new and simpler

means.

The primary laws of association, then, it appears, as far as they operate in our intellectual exertions, are greatly modified by original constitutional diversities. They are not less modified by constitutional diversities of another kind. These are the diversities of what is called temper, or disposition. It is thus we speak of one person of a gloomy, and of another of a cheerful disposition; and we avoid the one, and seek the company of the other, as if with perfect confidence, that the trains of thought which rise by spontaneous suggestion to the minds of each will be different, and will be in accordance with that variety of character which we have supposed. To the cheerful, almost every object which they perceive is cheerful as themselves. In the very darkness of the storm, the cloud which hides the sunshine from their eye, does not hide it from their heart: while, to the sullen, no sky is bright, and no scene

is fair. There are future fogs, which to their eyes, pollute and darken the purest airs of spring; and spring itself is known to them less as the season which follows and repairs the desolation of winter that is past, than as the season which announces its approaching return.

The next secondary law of suggestion to which I proceed, is one akin to the last which we have considered. The primary laws are modified, not by constitutional and permanent differences only, but by differences which occur in the same individual, according to the varying emotion of the hour. As there are persons, whose general character is gloomy or cheerful, we have, in like manner, our peculiar days or moments in which we pass from one of these characters to the other, and in which our trains of thought are tinctured with the corresponding varieties. A mere change of fortune is often sufficient to alter the whole cast of sentiment. Those who are in possession of public station, and power and affluence, are accustomed to represent affairs in a favourable light: the dissappointed competitors for place to represent them in the most gloomy light; and though much of this difference may, unquestionably, be ascribed to wilful mis-statement in both cases, much of it is, as unquestionably, referable to that difference of colouring in which objects appear to the successful and the unsuccessful.

The same remark may be applied to the different periods of life, to the happy thoughtlessness of youth, and to the cautious, calculating sadness of old age. The comparative gaiety of cur earlier years is not merely a cause, but an effect also, of the tendency of the mind, at that period, to suggest images of hope and pleasure, on almost every occasion.

If even a slight momentary feeling of joy or sorrow have the power of modifying our suggestions, in accordance with it, emotions of a stronger and lasting kind must influence the trains of thought still more ;-the meditations of every day rendering stronger the habitual connexions of such thoughts as accord with the peculiar frame of mind. It is in this way that every passion, which has one fixed object,-such as love, jealousy, revenge, derives nourishment from itself, suggesting images that give it, in return, new force and liveliness. We see, in every thing, what we feel in ourselves;

· Pope's Moral Essays, Ep. I. v. 158—161.