s,
transform and beautify the reality of things. The power of filling their
existence with happy day-dreams is their most precious luxury. They feel
the full force of the pathetic lines of an Irish poet:[64]

Sweet thoughts, bright dreams my comfort be,
I have no joy beside;
Oh, throng around and be to me
Power, country, fame and bride.

To train this side of our nature is no small part of the management of
character. There is a great sphere of happiness and misery which is
almost or altogether unconnected with surrounding circumstances, and
depends upon the thoughts, images, hopes and fears on which our minds
are chiefly concentrated. The exercise of this form of imagination has
often a great influence, both intellectually and morally. In childhood,
as every teacher knows, it is often a distracting influence, and with
men also it is sometimes an obstacle to concentrated reasoning and
observation, turning the mind away from sober and difficult thought; but
there is a kind of dreaming which is eminently conducive to productive
thought. It enables a man to place himself so completely in other
conditions of thought and life that the ideas connected with those
conditions rise spontaneously in the mind. A true and vivid realisation
of characters and circumstances unlike his own is acquired. The mere
fact of placing himself in other circumstances and investing himself
with imaginary powers and functions sometimes suggests possible remedies
for great human ills, and gives clearer views of the proportions,
difficulties and conditions of governments and societies. Much discovery
in science has been due to this power of the imagination to realise
conditions that are unseen, and the habit or faculty of living other
lives than our own is scarcely less valuable to the historian, and even
to the statesman, than to the poet or the novelist or the dramatist. It
gives the magic touch which changes mere lifeless knowledge into
realisation.

Its effect upon character also is great and various. No one can fail to
recognise the depraving influence of a corrupt imagination; and the
corruption may spring, not only from suggestions from without, but from
those which rise spontaneously in our minds. Nor is even the imagination
which is wholly pure absolutely without its dangers. It is a well-known
law of our nature that an excessive indulgence in emotion that does not
end in action tends rather to deaden than to