furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word
most exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey
it to others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet,
till he has looked with attention on the face of nature; or a
great dramatist, till he has felt and witnessed much of the
influence of the passions. Information and experience are,
therefore, necessary; not for the purpose of strengthening the
imagination, which is never so strong as in people incapable of
reasoning--savages, children, madmen, and dreamers; but for the
purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his conceptions to
others.

In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power.
So strong is the perception of what is unreal that it often
overpowers all the passions of the mind and all the sensations of
the body. At first, indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a
hidden treasure, a wordless poetry, an invisible painting, a
silent music, a dream of which the pains and pleasures exist to
the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the heart only knoweth, a
joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, by
which ideas are to be conveyed from one person to another, is as
yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great
gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest
state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which
gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the
inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of
the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild
superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the
winds into doleful voices. The belief which springs from it is
more absolute and undoubting than any which can be derived from