'
--_M. Antonin_. iii. 2.
THE
PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION.
A POEM.
GENERAL ARGUMENT.
The pleasures of the imagination proceed either from natural objects,
as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm
sea by moonlight; or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a
musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem. In treating of these
pleasures, we must begin with the former class; they being original
to the other; and nothing more being necessary, in order to explain
them, than a view of our natural inclination toward greatness and
beauty, and of those appearances, in the world around us, to which
that inclination is adapted. This is the subject of the first book
of the following poem.
But the pleasures which we receive from the elegant arts, from music,
sculpture, painting, and poetry, are much more various and
complicated. In them (besides greatness and beauty, or forms proper
to the imagination) we find interwoven frequent representations of
truth, of virtue and vice, of circumstances proper to move us with
laughter, or to excite in us pity, fear, and the other passions.
These moral and intellectual objects are described in the second book;
to which the third properly belongs as an episode, though too large
to have been included in it.
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