word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown
poet worked. In such a process the imagination is evoked in full and
free play; it insensibly reconstructs a life gone out of knowledge;
selects, harmonises, unifies, and in a measure creates. It illuminates
and unifies knowledge, divines the wide relations of thought, and
discerns its place in organic connection with the world which gave it
birth.

The material upon which this great power is nourished is specifically
furnished by the works which it has created. As the eye is trained to
discover the line of beauty by companionship with the works in which
it is revealed with the greatest clearness and power, so is the
imagination developed by intimacy with the books which disclose its
depth, its reality, and its method. The reader of Shakespeare cannot
follow the leadings of his masterly imagination without feeling a
liberation of his own faculty of seeing things as parts of a vast
order of life. He does not gain the poet's creative power, but he is
enlarged and enriched to the point where his own imagination plays
directly on the material about it; he receives it into himself, and in
the exact measure in which he learns the secret of absorbing what he
sees, feels, and knows, becomes master and interpreter of the world of
his time, and restorer of the world of other times and men. For the
imagination, playing upon fact and experience, divines their meaning
and puts us in possession of the truth and life that are in them. To
possess this magical power is to live the whole of life and to enter
into the heritage of history.