he
child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery--but the lack
of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the
wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so
terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle
and repress their real impulses and rush for things to hold in their
hands for a little time. If they had imagination they would see that the
things they hold in their hands are disintegrating _now_ as everything
in Nature is; that the hand itself weakens and loses its power. Why,
here we are upstanding--half-gods asleep within us. Imagination
alone--the seeing of the spirit of things--that can awaken us."

I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old
debatable ground--but the secret was out. It was the essence of my
forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of
everything else--all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.

"... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life
prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children
see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by
scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I
like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things
prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A
big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned
to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through
twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than
from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his
children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I
happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should
fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.

"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in
building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage
has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that
these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner
are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the
connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at
once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without
it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh
beneath, I talked of writing--something of w