And as Jacobitism
survived the Stuarts, so this has outlived the dynasty to which it
professes an after-dinner allegiance. It nails a horseshoe over the door,
but keeps a rattle by its bedside to summon a more substantial watchman;
it hangs a crape on the beehives to get a taste of ideal sweetness, but
obeys the teaching of the latest bee-book for material and marketable
honey. This is the aesthetic variety of the malady, or rather, perhaps,
it is only the old complaint robbed of all its pain, and lapped in waking
dreams by the narcotism of an age of science. To the world at large it is
not undelightful to see the poetical instincts of friends and neighbors
finding some other vent than that of verse. But there has been a
superstition of very different fibre, of more intense and practical
validity, the deformed child of faith, peopling the midnight of the mind
with fearful shapes and phrenetic suggestions, a monstrous brood of its
own begetting, and making even good men ferocious in imagined
self-defence.
Imagination, has always been, and still is, in a narrower sense, the
great mythologizer; but both its mode of manifestation and the force with
which it reacts on the mind are one thing in its crude form of childlike
wonder, and another thing after it has been more or less consciously
manipulated by the poetic faculty.
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