One of the most common notions regarding the imagination is that it pictures for the mind that which is not an object of sense. It is the image-making faculty: this gives it its name. It is regarded as one of the reproductive faculties, the memory being This definition, however, confuses imagination with

the other. conception.

It is well carefully to distinguish imagination from conception.✔ In general, conception has reference to single objects or ideas: imagination to their relation. An idea to be conceived is more or less isolated. Imagination, on the other hand, has a vision of an organic whole, composed of dissimilar objects or ideas. Imagination does not perceive mere fragments: it sees the whole at once. Its action is free and untrammelled. It never repeats itself. It never constructs by patchwork or by process of aggregation. It creates, as Nature does, from the centre outward; its visions grow. It is always characterized by simplicity, by unity and truth. The imagination creates all our ideals, and is the soul of all inspiration. Conceptions may weary, memory may pall upon our attention; but imagination, never.

Conception may be vivid, and imagination dim; for conception deals with distinct features, with things which lie on the plane of sense; whereas imagination may rise into the realm of pure spirit. The difference between conception and imagination has been very simply and plainly stated by Professor Shairp: "To a man's ordinary conception of things imagination adds force, clearness, distinction of outline, vividness of coloring." Imagination vitalizes all knowledge, shows us the kinship of things, gives to every object a situation or background, and so prevents knowledge from becoming isolated or disconnected; enables the soul to feel the life of the universe permeating every object.

We can analyze and read the following Shakespearian lyric so as to destroy all its poetry. A mere lark, or a mere gate, or even the flowers, or sunbeams in isolation, furnish no clew whatever to the thought or beauty of the poem. It is only when we take all these together, give vivid coloring and atmosphere, and idealize them into parts of one beautiful picture of morning, that we have the spirit of the poem:

Cymbeline.

HARK! hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,

His steeds to water at those springs

On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin

To ope their golden eyes;
With everything that pretty bin,
My lady sweet, arise!

Arise arise!

Shakespeare.

Imagination does not isolate conceptions: it not only conceives ideas and makes them clearer, but creates vital relations and restores normal situations and environment. Beauty and art deal with relation. Art is the creation of the right relation of objects. As life depends on environment, so do beauty, truth, and religion. The highest judgment of the human mind is a proper co-ordination of different ideas..

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL.

A naked house, a naked moor,
A shivering pool before the door,
A garden bare of flowers and fruit,
And poplars at the garden foot,
Such is the place that I live in,
Bleak without and bare within.

Yet shall your ragged moor receive
The incomparable pomp of eve,
And the cold glories of the dawn
Behind your shivering trees be drawn ;
And when the wind from place to place
Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,
Your garden gloom and gleam again,
With leaping sun, with dancing rain.
Here shall the wizard moon ascend
The heavens, in the crimson end
Of day's declining splendor; here

The army of the stars appear.
The neighbor hollows dry or wet,
Spring shall with tender flowers beset;

And oft the morning muser see

Larks rising from the broomy lea,

And every fairy wheel and thread
Of cobweb dew-bediamondèd.
When daisies go, shall winter time
Silver the simple grass with rime,
Autumnal frosts enchant the pool
And make the cart-ruts beautiful.
And when snow-bright the moor expands,
How shall your children clap their hands!
To make this earth, our hermitage,
A cheerful and a pleasant page,
God's bright and intricate device
Of days and seasons doth suffice.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the first six lines of the foregoing extract we find simple conceptions, given without atmosphere, or without any feeling of connection with other objects. In the next few lines the very same objects are taken up under the dominion of the imagination. Here there is insight into the relation or fellowship of things. Pictures of the simplest and plainest objects are filled by the imagination with all the beauty of light and atmosphere. In the first part, the house and objects are given literally. In the second, we have their fellowship with the sun and sky, with wind and weather. Things are painted as they exist in Nature, sharing in one another's life, reflecting and changing one another's appearance, as they have done every moment through all the history of the ages; and thus they are contemplated and conceived by a sympathetic mind that perceives from the heart.

PROBLEM I. Read a passage with definite, vivid conceptions, but without imaginative action; and then read the same with vivid conceptions related to one another by the imagination, and note the difference in effect upon the voice.

PROBLEM II. Read an imaginative passage with definite, clear, but isolated conceptions, and notice how the spirit of the passage is degraded.

PROBLEM III. Read a beautiful passage with, and then without, any background, and note the difference in expression.

PROBLEM IV. Distinguish between analytic and synthetic actions of the mind, and their effect upon the voice.

NEW Voices come to me where'er I roam;
My heart, too, widens with its widening home:
The former songs seem little; yet no more
Can soul, hand, voice, with interchanging lore,
Tell what the earth is saying unto me:

The secret is too great.

George Eliot

THE HOUSE OF THE TREES.

OPE your doors and take me in, spirit of the wood!
Wash me clean of dust and din, clothe me in your mood.
Take me from the noisy light to the sunless peace,
Where at midday standeth Night singing Toil's release.
All your dusky twilight stores to my senses give ;
Take me in and lock the doors, show me how to live.
Lift your leafy roof for me, part your yielding walls :
Let me wander lingeringly through your scented halls.
Ope your doors and take me in, spirit of the wood!
Take me- make me next of kin to your leafy brood.

FULL many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace :
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine, —
The regent cloud hath masked him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;

Ethelwyn Wetherald

Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.

SUCH a starved bank of moss till, that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash across: violets were born!
Sky- what a scowl of cloud till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud: splendid, a star!
World-how it walled about life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out that was thy face!

Shakespeare.

Browning.

Not only around our infancy

Doth heaven with all its splendors lie:
Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,
We Sinais climb, and know it not.
Over our manhood bend the skies;
Against our fallen and traitor lives

The great winds utter prophecies;

With our faint hearts the mountain strives;
Its arms outstretched, the Druid wood

Waits with its benedicite ;

And to our age's drowsy blood
Still shouts the inspiring sea.

Lowell

II. IMAGINATIVE ATTENTION.

THE eye-it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still;

Our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers which of themselves our minds impress, That we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness.

IF

ONE impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: we murder to dissect.

ONE moment now may give us more than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore the spirit of the season.

Wordsworth.

you ask any one whether attention is active or passive, he will be sure to answer, "It is active, of course. The reason for this is on account of the emphasis that is usually placed upon rational analysis, upon intellectual concentration, upon one fact or object or idea, to the exclusion of all others. By attention, most persons mean the concentration of the mind upon one thing to the exclusion of all others. But when we come to observe more carefully, we find that this is not the whole of attention. If at a symphony concert we give our attention to one man only in the orchestra, or to one instrument, excluding by the action of our mind the effect of others, we do not enjoy the music. Again, if we enter a gallery