Note 2 — PASSION AND IMAGINATION IN POETRY.

Characteristically Wordsworth, in his celebrated preface, illustrated what he meant by Imagination, not from his friend’s poetry, but his own. Upon the line “Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,” he thus comments: “The stock-dove is said to coo, a sound well imitating the note of the bird; but by the intervention of the metaphor broods, the affections are called in by the imagination to assist in marking the manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs her soft note, as if herself delighting to listen to it, and participatory of a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from the continuous process of incubation.”