germs of the Actual.

Nor does the necessity of referring to Nature preclude the
Imaginative, or any other class of Art that rests its truth in the
desires of the mind. In an especial manner must the personification
of Sentiment, of the Abstract, which owe their interest to the common
desire of rendering permanent, by embodying, that which has given us
pleasure, take its starting-point from the Actual; from something
which, by universal association or particular expression, shall recall
the Sentiment, Thought, or Time, and serve as their exponents; there
being scarcely an object in Nature which the spirit of man has not, as
it were, impressed with sympathy, and linked with his being. Of this,
perhaps, we could not have a more striking example than in the Aurora
of Michael Angelo: which, if not universal, is not so only because
the faculty addressed is by no means common. For, as the peculiar
characteristic of the Imaginative is its suggestive power, the effect
of this figure must of necessity differ in different minds. As in many
other cases, there must needs be at least some degree of sympathy with
the mind that imagined it, in order to any impression; and the degree
in which that is made will always be in proportion to the congeniality
between the agent and the recipient. Should it appear, then, to any
one as a thing of no meaning, it is not therefore conclusive that the
Artist has failed. For, if there be but one in a thousand to whose
mind it recalls the deep stillness of Night, gradually broken by the
awakening stir of Day, with its myriad forms of life emerging into
motion, while their lengthened shadows, undistinguished from their
objects, seem to people the earth with gigantic beings; then the dim,
gray monotony of color transforming them to stone, yet leaving them
in motion, till the whole scene becomes awful and mysterious as with
moving statues;--if there be but one in ten thousand who shall have