giving it room and air for healthful growth, they would crush and
confine it--with but one result of their victorious endeavours--
imposthume, fever, and corruption. And the disastrous consequences
would soon appear in the intellect likewise which they worship. Kill
that whence spring the crude fancies and wild day-dreams of the young,
and you will never lead them beyond dull facts--dull because their
relations to each other, and the one life that works in them all,
must remain undiscovered. Whoever would have his children avoid this
arid region will do well to allow no teacher to approach them--not
even of mathematics--who has no imagination.

"But although good results may appear in a few from the indulgence of
the imagination, how will it be with the many?"

We answer that the antidote to indulgence is development, not restraint,
and that such is the duty of the wise servant of Him who made the
imagination.

"But will most girls, for instance, rise to those useful uses of the
imagination? Are they not more likely to exercise it in building castles
in the air to the neglect of houses on the earth? And as the world
affords such poor scope for the ideal, will not this habit breed vain
desires and vain regrets? Is it not better, therefore, to keep to that
which is known, and leave the rest?"

"Is the world so poor?" we ask in return. The less reason, then, to be
satisfied with it; the more reason to rise above it, into the region of
the true, of the eternal, of things as God thinks them. This outward
world is but a passing vision of the persistent true. We shall not live
in it always. We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are