sion; and the most splendid powers
of expression will not avail him if his Vision be indistinct. This is
true of objects that never were seen by the eye, that never could be
seen. It is as true of what are called the highest flights of
imagination as of the lowest flights. The mind must SEE the angel or
the demon, the hippogriff or centaur, the pixie or the mermaid.

Ruskin notices how repeatedly Turner,--the most imaginative of
landscape painters,--introduced into his pictures, after a lapse of
many years, memories of something which, however small and unimportant,
had struck him in his earlier studies. He believes that all Turner's
"composition" was an arrangement of remembrances summoned just as they
were wanted, and each in its fittest place. His vision was primarily
composed of strong memory of the place itself, and secondarily of
memories of other places associated in a harmonious, helpful way with
the now central thought. He recalled and selected.

I am prepared to hear of many readers, especially young readers,
protesting against the doctrine of this chapter as prosaic. They have
been so long accustomed to consider imagination as peculiarly
distinguished by its disdain of reality, and Invention as only
admirable when its products are not simply new by selection and
arrangement, but new in material, that they will reject the idea of
involuntary remembrance of something originally experienced as the
basis of all Art. Ruskin says of great artists, "Imagine all that any
of these men had seen or heard in the whole course of their lives, laid
up accurately in their memories as in vast storehouses, extending with
the poets even to the slightest intonations of syllables heard in the
beginning of their lives, and with painters down to minute folds of
drapery and shapes of leaves and stones; and over all this unindexed
and immeasurable mass of treasure, the imagination brooding and
wandering, but dream-gifted, so as to summon at any moment exactly such
a group of ideas as shall justly fit each other." This is the
explanation of their genius, as far as it can be explained.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes. But
those who have had ample opportunities of intimately knowing the growth
of works in the minds of artists, will bear me out in saying that a
vivid memory supplies the elements from a thousand different sources,
most of which are quite beyond the power of localisation, the
experience o