It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us.
Awake, we never imagine anything; we merely alter, vary, or transpose.
We give another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around
us, and obtain another pattern; but not one of us has ever added one
tiniest piece of new glass to the toy.

A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller, and another race of
people larger than the race of people that live down his own streets.
And he also sees a land where the horses take the place of men. A
Bulwer Lytton lays the scene of one of his novels inside the earth
instead of outside. A Rider Haggard introduces us to a lady whose age
is a few years more than the average woman would care to confess to;
and pictures crabs larger than the usual shilling or eighteen-penny
size. The number of so called imaginative writers who visit the moon
is legion, and for all the novelty that they find, when they get
there, they might just as well have gone to Putney. Others are
continually drawing for us visions of the world one hundred or one
thousand years hence. There is always a depressing absence of human
nature about the place; so much so, that one feels great consolation
in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves shall be comfortably
dead and buried before the picture can be realized. In these
prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and happy,
and all the work is done by electricity.

There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds
to come. One is reminded of those pictorial enamel-paint
advertisements that one sees about so often now, in which all the
members of an extensive household are represented as gathered together
in one room, spreading enamel-paint over everything they can lay their
hands upon. The old man is on a step-ladder, daubing the walls and