in
eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched, measured, explained,
understood, argued over, is to the imaginative artist nothing more than a
means, for he belongs to the invisible life, and delivers its ever new and
ever ancient revelation. We hear much of his need for the restraints of
reason, but the only restraint he can obey is the mysterious instinct that
has made him an artist, and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in
mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love
in sexual passion.

1895.

THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX

The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition,
wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house
of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven
and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him
inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after
generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by
chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different
history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great
tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of
wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled
that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for
the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and
the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons
herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this
world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and
hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the
great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the
persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has
caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments
we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes.
Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play
about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia
and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and
expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of
the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of
criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of
moods, of