the materials of which they are composed, The architect, not his workmen—the plan, not the details of its execution—the design, not the methods of its accomplishment—these are within the higher view to which intellectual insight may aspire. Let us pay tribute to the gifted poet who taught us to contrast the insignificance of a fact with the sublime signification of a truth. No one may imagine for a moment that the imaginative faculty is an imaginary thing, or doubt the reality of imagination, because it is immaterial and immeasurable, inscrutable to the physical senses, unsusceptible of analysis or synthesis, triable by no test, overriding logic, outwitting philosophy, laughing at science—this imperious mistress of mind, this fertile mother of all art!
This, that, and the other, of things unnumbered, material and immaterial, wise and otherwise, make up the marvelous microcosm we call Self—the world where, like the sun of the planetary system, shines the intellect with perfect splendor. But, as the spectrum has dissected the solar ray, so has the understanding, by a process of self-inflicted vivisection that seems scarcely less than divine in its insight, pierced and resolved the mysteries of its own composition. We know that the mind is a bundle of many fagots, the united strength of which can never be broken, though racked on doubt and put to the wheel of despair—though cast beneath the car of superstition, or consigned to the nether millstone of inhuman persecution. We know that these mental fagots are of many kinds—sturdy oak of the scientist, pliable ash of the schoolman, sail-bearing pine of the positivist, cypress of pessimist, rose-wood of optimist, heart-wood, it may be, for all of us; and the one mysterious piece, so like and yet so unlike them all. Let the rest season, nay, even blacken: this one is changeless and ever-enduring, as fresh and as green as if cut but to-day from the parent stem; it buds on forever, like a wonderful air-plant whose tendrils find nourishment wherever there is sensitized atmosphere, and needs the grosser nurture of no vulgar mould; this veritable Hamamelis, witch-hazel of the mental sheaf, fitly styled the "divining-rod;" for this is the magic wand of the sculptor, the painter, the poet, the singer, the seer alike!
Technical definition of the imagination may be found in the dictionaries of all civilized languages—those monuments of learning and labor which compel the most profound respect, while they excite the liveliest emotions of gratitude and sympathy for the men who were born to erect them. But the conventional label of the imaginative faculty need not be recited before this Society; nor need I enlarge upon its manifest inadequacy beyond the requirements of formalism. Definition is, or should be, diagnostic description; but in what terms may that be described which exists only in imagination? Definition implies limitation and boundary; the gist of the term is the setting of corner-stones; but how measure off and survey that which is
