work expresses is not the object for its own sake but this larger unity
of his identity with it. To appreciate the artist's work, therefore, we
must in our turn merge ourselves in his emotion, and becoming one
with it, so extend our personality into larger life.

To make the artist's emotion our own, to identify ourselves with the
object which he presents to us, we must pass beyond the material
form in which the work is embodied, letting the spirit and meaning
of it speak to our spirit. In itself an individual picture or statue or
symphony is an objective, material thing, received into
consciousness along the channel of the senses; but its origin and its
end alike are in emotion. The material form, whether in nature or in
works of art, is only the means by which the emotion is
communicated. A landscape in nature is composed of meadow and
hills, blue sky and tumbling clouds; these are the facts of the
landscape. But they are not fixed and inert. The imagination of the
beholder combines these elements into a harmony of color and mass;
his spirit flows into consonance with the harmony his imagination
has compelled out of nature, becoming one with it. To regard the
world not as facts and things, but as everywhere the stimulus of
feeling, feeling which becomes our own experience, is the condition
of appreciation.

To the awakening mind of a child, life is full of wonder, and each
unfolding day reveals new marvels of excitement and surprise. As
yet untrammeled by any sense of the limitations of material, his
quick imagination peoples his world with creatures of his fancy,
which to him are more real than the things he is able actually to see
and touch. For him the external world is fluid and plastic, to be
moulded into forms at will in obedience to his creative desire. In the
tiny bundle of rags which mother-love clasps tight to her heart, a
little girl sees only the loveliest of babies; and a small boy with his
stick of lath and newspaper cap and plume is a mightier than
Napoleon. The cruder the toy, the greater is the pleasure in the game;
for the imagination delights in the exercise of itself. A wax doll, sent
from Paris, with flaxen hair and eyes that open and shut, is laid away,
when the mere novelty of it is exhausted, in theatric chest, and the
little girl is fondling again her first baby of rag and string. A real
steel sword and tin helmet are soon cast aside, and the boy is back
again among the toys of his own maki