by process from within, and is referred to that inner secret
spring of which the hold is never lost for an instant; so that every
sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens for us a way
down to the heart, leads us to the centre, and then leaves us to gather
what more we may; it is the open sesame of a huge, obscure, endless
cave, with inexhaustible treasure of pure gold scattered in it: the
wandering about and gathering the pieces may be left to any of us, all
can accomplish that; but the first opening of that invisible door in the
rock is of the imagination only.

Sec. 5. Signs of it in language.

Hence there is in every word set down by the imaginative mind an awful
under-current of meaning, and evidence and shadow upon it of the deep
places out of which it has come. It is often obscure, often half told,
for he who wrote it, in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have
been impatient of detailed interpretation, but if we choose to dwell
upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that
metropolis of the soul's dominion from which we may follow out all the
ways and tracks to its farthest coasts.

I think the "Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante" of Francesca di
Rimini, and the "He has no children" of Macduff are as fine instances as
can be given, but the sign and mark of it are visible on every line of
the four great men above instanced.

Sec. 6. Absence of imagination, how shown.

The imaginative writer, on the other hand, as he has never pierced to
the heart, so he can never touch it: if he has to paint a passion, he
remembers the external signs of it, he collects expressions of it from
other writers, he searches for similes, he composes, exaggerates, heaps
term on term, figure on figure, till we groan beneath the cold,
disjointed heap; but it is all faggot and no fire, the life breath is
not in it, his passion has the form of the Leviathan, but it never makes
the deep boil, he fastens us all at anchor in the scaly rind of it, our
sympathies remain as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

And that virtue of originality that men so strain after, is not newness,
as they vainly think, (there is nothing new,) it is only genuineness; it
all depends on this single glorious faculty of getting to the spring of
things and working out from that; it is the coolness, and clearness, and
deliciousness of the water fresh from the fountain head, opposed to the
thick, hot,