One general remark remains to be added. This beautiful longing of youth, a fruitful fancy, and a loving soul, are the best and most precious gifts of benignant nature, that dispenses with so liberal a hand, or, rather, not of nature, but of that wonderful Intelligence that presides in and over it. They form, as it were, a fair garden of hidden life within man. But as the first man was placed in the garden of Eden, not merely for his idle enjoyment, but, as it is expressly stated, "to dress it and to keep it," so here also, when this law of duty is neglected, the inmost heart of the most eminent characters and of the most richly-endowed natures becomes, as it were, a Paradise run wild and waste.
In the consideration of these three forms of man's higher effort--viz., longing, true love, and genuine enthusiasm--I have throughout silently implied, what no one can possibly deny, the co-operating influence of fancy. As in the evil passions it exercises an injurious, inflammatory, and destructive effect, so also it co-operates beneficially with the longing which is directed to the good and the divine, and imparts to it its animating ardor, and its highest energy. In the pure longing, indeed, the inventive fancy is dissolved in what has ceased to be an earthly feeling, and has become completely identified with the living soul. But in the love and enthusiasm which are directed to some actual object, it is the sustaining flame of life, and of all loftier aspirations which, as they spring from the source of fancy, attest its co-operation. It may be that the pure spirits are filled and pervaded with that loving veneration of the Deity which makes up their blissful existence, simply by means of the intuitive understanding and the pure will, without even any admixture of fancy. A human love or enthusiasm, however, which should be totally devoid of fancy, and free from its influence, will very rarely, if ever, be met with, and is but barely conceivable. This, however, does not involve any reproach or censure against man's love and enthusiasm, as though they were unreal and founded on an untruth. For nothing can be more erroneous than to suppose that the fancy must invariably be untrue and deceiving, or at least self-deceived. Such a supposition is derived merely from one species of it--the poetical fancy. And yet even this, in its genuine manifestations, contains beneath its privileged and permitted garb of external untruth, a rich store and living source of great and profound verities, of a peculiar kind, and belonging to an internal truth of nature. Or, perhaps, this misconception of fancy in general may have its origin in that abortion or corruption of it which operates so powerfully in the evil passions, which is undoubtedly in the highest degree deceptive and delusive. In and by itself, and taken in its widest signification, this faculty of fancy is, generally speaking, the living productive thought--the faculty of internal fertility--and which also with its outward organs, both of an earthly and a higher sense, apprehends the whole external world. It enters, therefore, with a living interest into every good as well as base pursuit of man, and giving new shapes of its own to all that it has once apprehended, labors to invest it with a living form, to apply and to realize it. In itself, therefore, and in its pure and uncorrupt state, far from clashing with the divine truth (which, however, is not in every case identical with the ordinary reality), fancy, as we shall show more fully in another place, admits of being easily reconciled with it. But of human things we must always judge by a human standard, and with due allowance. Even supposing that, in the case of a true love and a genuine enthusiasm, a passing thought may be detected, a momentary excitement or manifestation which goes beyond the exact line of the actual truth--even in such a case this love and this enthusiasm would not therefore be less real and genuine--still would not all be exaggeration that might seem so to the unsympathizing and unenthusiastic intellect. At all events, it must ever remain undeniable, that emergencies occur in human life which are not met by the rigorous and mathematical formularies of ethical science, and where by nothing but a noble sacrifice of love far transcending all the common and general requisitions of the practical reason--by nothing but a lofty energy and resolute enthusiasm--can a man extricate himself from his perplexities and arrive at a happy result.