whose truth approves itself only to the inward sense. Examples crowd upon us here, but we deem it unnecessary to give them. Whoever can seize the distinction here indicated can adduce them for himself.

Secondly, imagination is a creative power. And here its relation to language becomes more conspicuous. 1. Its simplest exercise in this capacity is when we give a name to an external object, i. e. when we express or image forth our idea of a thing by a word. Here the word which corresponds to the material of the thing, i. e. some outward symbol or phenomenon of which it is commonly an imitation, manifests our idea or thought of it, just as its counterpart in nature manifests its idea, so that this first step in language is truly a creative process, an imitation by the mind of that which is ever going on in nature. Perhaps this process will be better understood by an analogous example from the department of pure ideas. A geometrician represents a mathematical or ideal line by an actual stroke drawn on the slate. This visible line or stroke is not the real line (which is without breadth or thickness), but only its image or symbol, which represents and conveys the idea to the imagination. It is important to remark here, that the same power which creates or constructs the image out of the idea, is employed to read or apprehend the idea through its image; and the same precisely is true in the case of words, which also are images of ideas. 2. The next operation of this power is, when we body forth in language the thought or meaning expressed by the collective object or features of nature. As when a poet represents the beauty of a summer evening, not by a bare description or detail of its external features, but by first reading these features, i. e. receiving into his soul the indwelling law or spirit of the scene, and then expressing this in the same images and symbols in which it is expressed in nature, that is, re-creating the scene as a whole through its idea. A perfect example of this is seen in Milton's L'Allegro and Penseroso. Here the poet looks at nature not so much with the outward eye as with the eye of the mind, and depicts it also with the same faculty, viz. imagination. The scenes and objects presented stand before us idealized, and for this reason are more true than in an ordinary description. 3. But there are other thoughts to be expressed than those we receive from without, and which we find actually embodied in nature, thoughts born within the soul itself, ideals above nature, which can therefore be only proximately represented by its forms. And here imagination assumes its most important prerogative, in seizing the elements of this natural language, i. e. the forms and appearances of nature, and re-combining them into a perfect language

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for the mind; appropriating and assimilating the materials found in nature to the inward thought, just as the organific principle in the tree subordinates the like elementary materials to its own life.

Every moral term, however abstract, if traced to its root will be found to stand originally for something sensible, some fact or appearance in nature, which appearance and not the abstract term is the primary symbol or body of the thought. Thus right primarily means straight; wrong means twisted; attention is a stretching to; reflection, turning back, etc. These it will be seen are not arbitrary applications, but rest on a real affinity and correspondence between physical and mental phenomena. The image and the thought conveyed by it have an inward relationship which imagination discovers; and this is not limited to a few striking analogies, but pervades the entire realms of nature and mind, showing that both rest upon one and the same ground.

The human mind, then, through its perceptive and creative faculty of imagination, finding these natural images preädapted to its necessi ties, transfers them out of the relation and use they hold in nature, and re-combines them after a new and higher law in its own thought; thus forming a new creation out of the old, but without violence to its laws. This is the creation of language, of which imagination is the organizing soul. The forms and images without are transferred within, or to the pages of literature, and wrought into new structures, made to body forth and represent new ideas. But this is possible only through a like power with that which originally constructed them, viz. the power of thought.

Thus nature may be said to possess a two-fold existence or life. The first is that which exists for the senses, in the manifold forms and creations around us, which is its earthly and temporal life; the second when it passes into a higher and spiritual life in the immortal forms of language and of literature. Language also passes through two stages, the primary or physical, when words represent simply things; and the secondary or moral, when things and their corresponding words become the representatives of moral ideas in the mind. This second stage or process is discernible in what are called metaphors, which are things taken from nature to represent or body forth other things or thoughts resembling them; as when we say light for knowledge, a rock for stability, etc. Now in these and similar cases, there is more than an arbitrary association between the thing or sensible image and the moral idea. There is first an inherent and preexisting affinity or fitness to each other; next a recognition of this fitness by the imagination; and, finally, the actual joining or marriage of the

two in a word. Or to vary the illustration, there is in every such word a real incarnation; the ideal or spiritual thought enters into a sensible form, so that it addresses the mind through the sense, or rather both at once in the imagination, which is the connecting or mediating faculty between them.

Since almost all the terms of language are thus metaphorical, i. e. are images brought over from nature, we may learn how much we owe to poets who first discover and wed these images or symbols to human thought. Poets are indeed in all ages the creators and regenerators of language. They supply its life by keeping it in ever fresh and vital contact with nature, whence it is derived. The poetry of a language is its true life-blood; and so soon as a language has lost its poetry, i. e. so soon as its words have become abstract, and no longer remand us to nature, or things as the types of thoughts, it is already dead; dead not by the extinction of the thought but of its body, the natural image which incarnates the thought. For a word as truly dies when its body decays and falls away, as a man.

In the infancy of a language all its words are poetical, because they are taken fresh from the living mint of nature. They are the true images of things, whose presence they recall whenever used. By and by these images become defaced and worn off by constant attrition in the market. They are then like worn out coins, which although "current" have only a nominal value. Then new poets or makers are needed to restore the original images and to create new. All living languages are constantly undergoing this decay and renovation. 4. The last and highest exercise of the imagination, is when not only individual forms and images, but the universe as a whole is subordinate to some ruling thought or passion of the mind. The whole of nature here becomes plastic to the sovereign power of imagination, held in solution, as it were, by the mind, which attracts and crystalizes around its own thought whatever without is kindred to it or can be made to receive its mould. The human world within and the material world without are for the time commingled into one, and love, weep, tremble and rejoice together. This is possible only as the result of high wrought emotion, and under the stress of the most intense and absorbing passion, when imagination is always the most active; and constitutes the highest triumph of the poet and the orator. This triumph is achieved in Lear, where the poet gathering around this "despised old man" all the congregated symbols of his state, all that is wildest and most desolate in nature and in man, night and tempest, an open heath and raving lunacy, he sends forth this forlorn but kingly soul to reign among them as the genius of the scene, to

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It will be seen from this review, what is the relation which imagination sustains to nature, and through this to language. It is the true mediator between the mind within, and nature or the world of things without; first, reading things, or educing the thoughts contained in them, and then embodying these thoughts anew, and sending them forth as things of the mind in the immortal creations of language. In both capacities, whether as looking through the outward forms of nature to the Divine indwelling thought, and thus wedding the universe to the mind as science, or as linking its own thoughts to the forms and imagery of nature, as in literature and art, it is the same sovereign, reconciling and assimilating power. Language is the true creature of the imagination, both originally and always; and the power or perfection of the one indicates and keeps pace with that of the other. This is seen most strikingly by contrasting the ancient Greeks and the Chinese, the intellectual antipodes of the human race. The latter people are utterly devoid of imagination, hence they have no language, or none that deserves the name. Of the former, imagination was the distinctive attribute, and in its highest degree; and their language is the most perfect ever created by man, the true child and image of the Grecian genius.

But we may not dwell longer on the nature of this power, the highest, as we think we have shown, among the intellectual powers of man, the most essential to the perception and expression of truth, yet alas, how sadly misunderstood and abused! We have dwelt thus long on the exposition of it, and still linger a moment in its application, because we feel deeply its claims to a better understanding and regard, and not without the hope of awakening in others a like sense of its value. Without it, as we have seen, language is impossible except as a dead and mindless formula, and thinking, which involves language, is not less dependent on it for all its life and energy. Whoever apprehends the close and vital relation subsisting between thoughts and words, and the consequent reflex influence which the latter must have upon the former; especially whoever considers the almost miraculous charm and potency of "a word fitly spoken," and the pernicious and baneful effect both upon speaker and hearer, of a word unfitly spoken, or untrue to the thought, will be able to appreciate that power which gives the right word to the thought, which is the sealing and witnessing bond that unites the two, and is therefore the only true interpreter and mediator between them.

It is the only security we know of clear, profound and accurate

thinking, since it gives a body, with form and outline, to thought, and thus sets it before the mind with all the distinctness and reality of outward things. It illustrates and irradiates thought, and truth likewise, so that it is beheld in clear sunlight, not as a dim abstraction, but as an actual and living incarnation. The man without imagination may stumble upon truth, or hear its voice and follow it, but cannot discover it or discern its form. The difference between his thinking and that of its possessor, is just the difference between darkly "feeling after, and haply finding" the truth, and beholding it in clear and solemn vision. Hence the Divine revelations made to prophets, in the olden time, were addressed to the imagination, as the only faculty which could truly apprehend and convey them.

To the metaphysician, by which we mean one who is conversant with the things of the mind, and not merely with abstract and dead terms divorced from these, and to whomsoever would obey the heavendescended precept, " Know thyself," this power is the most indispensable of all, and the highest degree of it too. None other can penetrate deep enough into the mind to seize its hidden and central laws, or arrest the subtle and vanishing apparitions that make up its phenomena, hold them in their individual shapes before the eye of the soul, and question them of their birth and issue. None but this can apprehend those tenuous distinctions which are the hieroglyphics of the mind, that must be traced and understood before it can be read. Hence it is that poets have hitherto been our best mental philosophers; and we must believe they will ever continue to be.

But if this high power be thus essential to the thinker and student of truth, it surely is not less so to him who would exhibit it to others. Truth to be seen and embraced, must be embodied, clothed in a sensible and living form, that so it may meet and satisfy the whole being of man, and not the intellect alone. To satisfy a living man it must present itself as life, having form and breath and motion, and not as a dead abstraction. Hence the universal charm of fables, of ballads, of true romance, and even of allegory; where, as in Bunyan, moral truths are really incarnated, and live and walk in this our human world, and are not apparitions only, ghostly virtues from the realm of shades.

To none, then, for hither our remarks and illustrations tend, to none is this power so absolutely indispensable, especially at the present day, as to the preacher, the commissioned seer and herald of divine truth to men. He of all others has to do with truth, and with truth alone. He is required to look the deepest into nature and man, to seek out and recognize its sacred presence wherever it abides, in all its near and