have perished without thought or memory of
the beauty which has encompassed them. All this the Imagination has
interpreted for us. It has fashioned life for us, and the dullest mind
that plods and counts and dies is ministered to and enriched by it. It
does magical things. It puts on its robe and opens its book, and
straightway the heavens rain melody and drop riches upon us. But this
is its play. In these displays of its art it hints at the resources at
its command, at the marvels it will yet bring to pass. Meanwhile it
has made the earth hospitable for us and taught men how to live above
the brutes."

The Poet stopped abruptly, as if he had been caught in the act of
preaching, and Rosalind gave the sermon a delightful ending.

"I wonder," she said, "if love would be possible without the
Imagination? For the heart of love is the perception of a deep and
genuine fellowship of the soul, and the end of love is the happiness
which comes through ministry. Could we understand a human soul or
serve it if the Imagination did not aid us with its wonderful light?
Is it not the Imagination which enables me to put myself in another's
place, and so to sympathise with another's sorrow and share another's
joy? Could a man feel the sufferings of a class or a race or the world
if the Imagination did not open these things to him? And if he did not
understand, could he serve?"

No one answered these questions, for they made us aware on the instant
how dependent are all the deep and beautiful relations of life on this
wonderful faculty. But for this "master light of all our seeing," how
small a circle of light would lie about our feet, how vast a darkness
would engulf the world!

V

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!

We had never thought of the island in the old days save as lashed by
tempests; but now the suns rose and set, dawn wore its shining veil and
night its crest of stars and not a cloud darkened the sky; we seemed to
be in the heart of a vast and changeless calm. There was no monotony
in the unbroken succession of the days, but the changes were wrought by
light, not by darkness. The singing of the sea, never rising into
those shrill upper notes which bode disaster, nor sinking into the deep
lower tones through which the awful thunder of the elements breaks,
came to us as out of the depths of an