I may, however, observe, in passing, that the following seem to be some of the most prominent notes of the way in which imagination seems to work:

1. To a man's ordinary conceptions of things, imagination adds force, clearness, distinctness of outline, vividness of coloring.

2. Again, it seems to be a power that lies intermediate between intellect and emotion, looking both ways, and partaking of the nature of each. In its highest form it would seem to be based on "moral intensity." The emotional and the intellectual in it act and react on each other, deep emotion kindling imagination, and expressing itself in imaginative forms, and imaginative insight kindling a deepening emotion.

3. Closely connected with this is what some have called the penetrative, others the interpretative, power of imagination. It is that subtle and mysterious gift, that intense intuition, which, piercing beneath all surface appearance, goes straight to the core of an object, enters where reasoning and pedling analysis are at fault, lays hold of the inner heart, the essential life of a scene, a character, a situation, and expresses it in a few immortal words. What is the secret of this penetrative glance, who shall say? It defies analysis. Neither the poet himself, who puts it forth, nor the critic who examines the result, can explain how it works-can lay his finger on the vital source of it. A line, a word, has flashed the scene upon us, has made the character live before us-how we know not, only the thing is done. And others when they see it exclaim: "How true to nature this is! So like what I have often felt myself, only I could never express it." But the poet has expressed it, and this is what makes him an interpreter to men of their own unuttered experience. All great poets are full of this power. It is that by which Shakespeare read the inmost heart of man, Wordsworth of nature.

4. A fourth note of imagination is that combining and har monizing power by which the poetic mind, guided by the eternal forms of beauty which inhabit it, out of a mass of incongruous materials drops those which are accidental and irrelevant, and selects those which suit its purpose, those which bring out a given scene or character, and combines them into a harmonious whole.

5. The last note I shall mention is what may be called the shaping or embodying power of imagination—I mean the power of clothing intellectual and spiritual conceptions in appropriate sensible forms. This is that Shakespeare speaks of:

"Imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown,"

There is also in imagination a power which works conversely, spiritualizing what is visible and corporeal, and filling it with a higher meaning than mere understanding dreams of. These two processes are seen at work in all great poets, the one or the other being stronger, according to the predominating bent of each poet's nature.

V. While imagination, working in these and other ways, is the poet's peculiar endowment, it is clear that, for its beneficent operation, there must be present an ample range, a large store of material on which to work. This it cannot create for itself. From other regions it must be gathered: from a wealth of mind in the poet himself, from large experience of life and intimate knowledge of nature; from the exercise of his heart, his judgment, his reflection, indeed of his whole being, on all he has seen and felt. In fact, a great poet must be a man made wise by large experience, much feeling, and deep reflection; above all, he must have a hold of the great central truth of things. When these many conditions are present, then, and then only, can his imagination work widely, benignly, and for all time; then only can the poet become a "serene creator of immortal things."

Imagination then, we see, is not, as has sometimes been conceived, a faculty of falsehood or deception, nor of merely fictitious and fantastic views. It is permanently a truthful and truth-seeing faculty, perceiving subtle aspects of truth, hidden relations, far-reaching analogies, which find no entrance to us by any other inlet.

It is the power which vitalizes all knowledge, which makes the dead abstract and the dead concrete meet, and by their meeting mutually live; which suffers not truth to dwell apart in one compartment of the mind, but carries it home through our whole being-understanding, affections, will.

This vivid insight, this quick imaginative intuition, is surely accompanied by a delight in the object or truth beheld, a glow of heart, "a white heat of emotion," which is the proper condition of creation. This joy of imagination in its own vision, this thrill of delight, is one of the most exquisite moods man ever experiences. Emotion, then, we see from first to last, insepar ably attends the exercise of imagination, pre-eminently in him who creates, in a lesser degree in those who enjoy his creations.

VI. In this aspect of poetry, as in some sense the immediate product of emotion some have seen its necessary weakness and its limitation. Emotion, they say, belongs to youth and must needs disappear before ripe, mature reason and reflection. Time must dull feelings, however vivid; cool down passions, however fervid. How many poets have reiterated Byron's lament that

"The early glow of thought declines in feeling's dull decay"!

How much of the poetry of all ages is filled with passionate regrets for objects

"Too early lost, too hopelessly deplored"!

No wonder, therefore, that strong men who despise sentimentality, and will not spend their lives in bemoaning the inevitable, are wont as they grow older to drop poetry of this kind, along with other youthful illusions. The truth of this cannot be gainsaid. The poetry of regret may please youth, which has buoyancy enough in itself to bear the weight of sadness not its own. But those who have learned by experience what real sorrow is, have no strength to waste on imaginary sorrow. And if all poetry were of this character, it would be true enough that it contained no refreshment for toiling, suffering men.

But, not to speak of purely objective poets, there is in the greatest of meditative poets a higher wisdom, a serener region, than that of imaginative regret. There are poets who, after having experienced and depicted the tumults of the soul, after having felt and sung the pain of unsatisfied desires, the sorrow that things "depart which never may return," have been able to retire within themselves, thence to contemplate the fever of

excitement from a higher, more permanent region, and to illuminate, as has been said, transitory emotion with "the light of a calm, infinite world." They do not ignore the heartless things that are done in the world, but they forgive them; the dark problems of existence they try not to explain, only they make you feel that there is light behind, though they cannot utter it; the discords and dissonances of life are still there, but over them all they seem to shed a reconciling spirit. This serene wisdom, this large and luminous contemplation, absorbs into itself all conflict, passion, and regret, as the all-embracing blue of heaven holds the storms and clouds that momentarily sweep over it. It is seen in the "august repose" of Sophocles, when he prepares the calm close for the troubled day of the blind and exiled Theban king. It is seen in the spirit that pervades the Tempest, one of Shakespeare's latest dramas, in which, to use his own words, he "takes part with his nobler reason against his fury," and rises out of conflict of passion into a region of serenity and self-control. It is seen in Milton when, amid the deep solitariness of his own blindness and forced inactivity, he is enabled to console himself with the thought,

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

It is seen in Wordsworth-him who, while feeling, as few have done, regret for a brightness gone which nothing could restore, was able to let all these experiences melt into his being and enrich it, till his soul became humanized by distress, and the thoughts that spring out of human suffering. Poetry such as this stands the wear of life, and breathes a benediction even over its decline.

VII. As to the aim which the poet sets before him, the end which poetry is meant to fulfil, what shall be said? Here the critics, ancient and modern, answer almost with one voice that the end is to give pleasure. Aristotle tells us that "it is the business of the tragic poet to give that pleasure which arises from pity and terror, through imitation." Horace gives an alternative end in his "Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare poetæ :" and he gives the palm to those poems which combine both ends and at once elevate and please. To take one sample from the

moderns. Coleridge, in his definition of poetry, tells us that "a poem is a species of composition, opposed to science, as having intellectual pleasure for its object or end, and that its perfection is to communicate the greatest immediate pleasure from the parts, compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole."

May I venture to differ from these great authorities, and to say that they seem to have mistaken that which is an inseparable accompaniment for that which is the main aim, the proper end, of poetry. The impulse to poetic composition is, I believe, in the first instance spontaneous, almost unconscious; and where the inspiration, as we call it, is deepest and most genuine, there a conscious purpose is least present. When a poet is in the true creative mood, he is for the time possessed with love and delight in the object, the truth, the vision which he sees, for its own sake-is wholly absorbed in it; the desire fitly to express what he sees and feels is his one sufficient motive, and to attain to this is itself his end and his reward. While the inspiration is at its strongest, the thought of giving pleasure to others or of winning praise for himself is weakest. The intrinsic delight in his own vision, and in the act of expressing it, keeps all extrinsic aims, for a time at least, aloof. This might perhaps be a sufficient account of the poet's aim in short lyrics and brief arrow-flights of song. But even in the richest poetic natures the inspiring heat cannot always or long be maintained at its height.

"And tasks in hours of insight willed,

In hours of gloom must be fulfilled."

Great poets can hardly be conceived to have girded them. selves to their longest, most deliberate efforts-Shakespeare to Hamlet, Milton to Paradise Lost-without reflecting what was to be the effect of their work on their fellow-men. It would hardly have satisfied them at such a time to have told them that their poetry would add to men's intellectual pleasures. They would not have been content with any result short of this -the assurance that their work would live to awaken those high sympathies in men in the exercise of which they themselves found their best satisfaction, and which, they well knew, ennoble every one who partakes of them. To appeal to the