e sensation of
hearing doubtless comes next, and then those of touch, smell, and taste.
A name will suffice to make us see the face of an absent friend; a few
words, or the sight of a music roll, is enough to make us hear a
favorite melody; a line or two on a printed page brings back to us the
scent of the hayfield or the heavy odor of hyacinths in a conservatory.
We must remember, too, that this may be in each case, not simply a
bringing back of the idea of the things, but a reviving of the
sensations themselves. The seat of sensation is after all the brain.
Originally we experience sensation through some excitation of the end
organs of sense, the ear, the nerves of touch, the retina; but these
sensations become associated with verbal images in the mind, and finally
the excitation of the verbal images results also in the revival of the
original sensation. There is perhaps no one of us who has not seen
wholly imaginary moving shadows or flashing lights in the dark. Such
cases are not good illustrations of the point, possibly, but most of us
can at will hear a connected succession of notes with which we have
familiarized ourselves. In my own recent experience there occurred a
very clear and wholly unexpected subjective sense of smell when reading
of an experiment with frogs which recalled the distinctive odor of slimy
water. Mr. James Sully, in "Illusions," says, "Stories are told of
portrait painters who could summon visual images of their sitters with a
vividness equal to that of reality, and serving all the purposes of
their art." The same writer says again, and this is peculiarly
significant, that "the physiologist Gruithuisen had a dream in which the
principal feature was a violet flame, and which left behind it, _after
waking_ for an appreciable duration, a complementary image of a yellow
spot." Here a purely subjective impression had been reproduced in the
nerves of sense.

=17. The Place of Sensation in Writing.=--The thing that it seems
important to dwell upon here is that subjective sensations do go out
from the brain and stimulate in a very real fashion the sensations that
are naturally excited by external stimuli localizing themselves in the
end organs of sense. As these sensations, while not the all of emotion,
are largely involved in emotion as its more poignant element, and as
emotion is a first requisite in the appeal of a story, it is evident
that the writer of stories will do well to acquire the art of