Note † — Chapter XXXII · The Imagination

“That synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities . . . the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement.” “The sense of musical delight . . . with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling†” these are gifts of the imagination. It was natural, we shall shortly see why, for Coleridge to carry his further speculations upon Imagination into the realms of Transcendentalism, but setting this aside, there is enough in this description and in the many applications and elucidations scattered through the Biographia and the Lectures to justify Coleridge’s claim to have put his finger more nearly than anyone else upon the essential characteristic of poetic as of all valuable experience.