passions, the tortures, the despairs of imagination are greater
far than the seeming REAL, petty afflictions with which human
beings daily perplex themselves; indeed, I have often wondered..
"here his eyes grew more earnest and reflective ..." whether this
busy working of the brain called 'Imagination' may not perhaps be
a special phase or supreme effort of MEMORY, and that therefore we
do not IMAGINE so much as we remember. For instance,--if we have
ever lived before, our present recollection may, in certain
exalted states of the mind, serve to bring back the shadow-
pictures of things long gone by, . . good or evil deeds, . . scenes of
love and strife, . . ethereal and divine events, in which we have
possibly enacted each our different parts as unwittingly as we
enact them here!".. He sighed and seemed somewhat troubled, but
presently continued in a lighter tone.. "Yet, after all, it is not
necessary for the poet to personally experience the emotions
whereof he writes. The divine Hyspiros depicts murderers, cowards,
and slaves in his sublime Tragedies,--but thinkest thou it was
essential for him to become a murderer, coward, and slave himself
in order to delineate these characters? And I ... I write of
Love,--love spiritual, love eternal,--love fitted for the angels I
have dreamt of--but not for such animals as men,--and what matters
it that I know naught of such love, . . unless perchance I knew it
years ago in some far-off fairer sphere! ... For me the only charm
of worth in woman is beauty! ... Beauty! ... to its entrancing
sway my senses all make swift surrender ..."

"Oh, too swift and too degrading a surrender!" interrupted Theos
suddenly with reproachful vehemence ... "Thy words do madden
patience!--Better a thousand times that thou shouldst perish, Sah-
lama, now in the full plenitude of thy poet-glory, than thus