little, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creative
might, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of his
brain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought,
throbbing with humanity.

When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it
with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical
substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses
it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through
this power and freedom of _play_ elicits by sympathetic fervor, from
its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the
sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus
vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision,--insights gained never but
through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations
after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect
being used as an obedient cheerful servant.

The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses,
revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might
seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer
than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever
plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing,
according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding
everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature
and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those
richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating
insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than
minds less creatively endowed.

Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all