PSEUDO-imaginative, betraying an utter want of steady Vision. Here is
one:--

"His hand the good man fixes on the skies,
And bids earth roll, nor feels the idle whirl."

"Pause for a moment," remarks a critic, "to realise the image, and the
monstrous absurdity of a man's grasping the skies and hanging
habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids earth roll,
warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a
conception." [WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. cxxxi., p. 27]. It is obvious
that if Young had imagined the position he assigned to the good man he
would have seen its absurdity; instead of imagining, he allowed the
vague transient suggestion of half-nascent images to shape themselves
in verse.

Now compare with this a passage in which imagination is really active.
Wordsworth recalls how--

" In November days
When vapours rolling down the valleys made
A lonely scene more lonesome; among the woods
At noon; and mid the calm of summer nights,
When by the margin of the trembling lake
Beneath the gloomy hills homeward I went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine."

There is nothing very grand or impressive in this passage, and
therefore it is a better illustration for my purpose. Note how happily
the one image, out of a thousand possible images by which November