g thus
vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision,--insights gained never but
through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations
after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect
being used as an obedient cheerful servant.

The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses,
revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might
seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer
than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever
plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing,
according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding
everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature
and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those
richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating
insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than
minds less creatively endowed.

Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all
intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a
power without which the daily business of life even could not go on,
being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its
materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect
stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling;
and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by
emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.

Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the
intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the
effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or
conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the
production of poetry?

Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare's
plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run
over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how
rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you
shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic,
comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought,
accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide
provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion
so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most
precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the
morning when the pape