will elevate them to their true and noble service. Seek not that your
sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams;
seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble
dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and
will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible
inculcations of morality. Nor can religion herself ever rise up into her
own calm home, her crystal shrine, when one of her wings, one of the
twain with which she flies, is thus broken or paralyzed.

"The universe is infinitely wide,
And conquering Reason, if self-glorified,
Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall
Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone,
Imaginative Faith! canst overleap,
In progress towards the fount of love."

The danger that lies in the repression of the imagination may be well
illustrated from the play of "Macbeth." The imagination of the hero (in
him a powerful faculty), representing how the deed would appear to
others, and so representing its true nature to himself, was his great
impediment on the path to crime. Nor would he have succeeded in reaching
it, had he not gone to his wife for help--sought refuge from his
troublesome imagination with her. She, possessing far less of the
faculty, and having dealt more destructively with what she had, took his
hand, and led him to the deed. From her imagination, again, she for her
part takes refuge in unbelief and denial, declaring to herself and her
husband that there is no reality in its representations; that there is
no reality in anything beyond the present effect it produces on the mind
upon which it operates; that intellect and courage are equal to any,
even an evil emergency; and that no harm will come to those who can rule