dy Macbeth.

"Imagination," "the shaping gift of imagination," is this power of first
presenting a thing to your own brain with luminousness. For once
etymology lends real aid. _Imaginatio_ is "the making of pictures." It
is inseparable from the power of perfect expression.

Why did the people of Verona whisper of Dante, "Yonder is the man who
has been in Hell?" Simply because of this power. Dante saw the place of
torment in his imagination, not as any of us might see it, vaguely
terrible, but clear in every dread and horrid detail. And, having so
seen it, he lends to that seeing the gift of expression, and with a few
simple verbs and nouns and plain forceful similes he makes his readers
see what he had seen. So did it come about that he was regarded as the
man who had actually "been in Hell." How far does Milton stand below him
in this imaginative vision! Milton, too, describes an Inferno, but it
lacks the convincingness of one who has seen it for himself. We could
never say that Milton was the man who had "been in Hell."

What is the special power of Carlyle in his dealings with history? It is
the power of summoning up visions of the past, standing out clear to
the last particular, as if lightning illuminated them against the
background of the ages.

I do not know whether any better definition of imagination can be given
than that of Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. "Imagination is the power
of seeing anything we describe as if it were real, so that, looking at
it as we describe, points may strike us which will give a vividness to
the description that would not have occurred to vague memory, or been
easily borrowed from the expressions of other writers." I do not say we
can necessarily describe a thing _because_ we so see it, but I do say
that we cannot describe it _unless_ we so see it. Therefore the supreme
literary gift of communicating exactly what we think and feel, exactly
as we think and feel it, involves no mere control of language, but,
therewith, an imaginative brain to realize conceptions as vivid
pictures. To combine these powers is to be a genius of great rarity.

In one part of the _Inferno_ of Dante it rains fire. To say that much
would be enough for the ordinary writer. But Dante not only sees fire
falling; he sees exactly how it falls, and the picture in his mind
becomes the picture in ours, when he simply says that it fell silently,
steadily "as fall broad flakes of snow when winds are still." Pe