I HAVE seen

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.

Even such a shell the universe itself

Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times,
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things,
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation. Here you stand,
Adore, and worship, when you know it not;
Pious beyond the intention of your thought;
Devout above the meaning of your will.

Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel.

Wordswork...

Brougham has criticised Burke upon the passage here abridged, and upon his use of the figure of the gathering storm, and has compared it with the same figure in Demosthenes.

Professor Jebb says, however, that this is a failure to appreciate the different points of view. "Burke is a painter; Demosthenes is a sculptor." That is to say, the imagination of the two men acted in a different way; and it is very imperfect criticism that will compare the difference in the creative actions of their minds to the disparagement of either orator. The imagination in every human being is more or less peculiar and different. The imagination never copies or imitates. Whenever it is true it is original. It was impossible for- Burke, with his modern training, to have portrayed his images like one educated beneath the Parthenon.

DESTRUCTION OF THE CARNATIC.

WHEN at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, be decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He

resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection.

... He drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the art of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic.

Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and of which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function, - fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. . . . So completely did these masters of their art — Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son-absolve themselves of their impious vow, that, when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one fourfooted beast of any description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region.

Burke.

THE people gave their voice, and the danger that hung upon our borders went by like a cloud.

Demosthenes.

WITH that I saw two swans of goodly hue

Come softly swimming down along the lee :

Two fairer birds I yet did never see;

The snow which doth the top of Pindus strow

Did never whiter show;

Nor Jove himself, when he a swan would be

For love of Leda, whiter did appear.

Yet Leda was (they say) as white as he,
Yet not so white as these, nor nothing near;
So purely white they were

That even the gentle stream, the which them bare,
Seem'd foul to them, and bade his billows spare
To wet their silken feathers, lest they might
Soil their fair plumes with water not so fair,
And mar their beauties bright

That shone as Heaven's light

Against their bridal day, which was not long.
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.

From "Prothalamion."

Spenser.

ITYLUS.

SWALLOW, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
What hast thou found in the spring to follow ?
What hast thou found in thy heart to sing?

What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow,
Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south,

The soft south, whither thine heart is set?
Shall not the grief of the old time follow ?
Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth?
Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?

Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and the south;
But I, fulfilled of my heart's desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth
Feed the heart of the night with fire.

I, the nightingale, all spring through,
O swallow, sister, O changing swallow,

All spring through, till the spring be done,
Clothed with the light of the night on the dew, -
Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow,
Take flight and follow and find the sun.

O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow,

I pray thee sing not a little space.

Are not the roofs and the lintels wet!
The woven web that was plain to follow,
The small slain body, the flower-like face,
Can I remember if thou forget?

O sister, sister, thy first-begotten!

The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
"Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?"
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,

But the world shall end when I forget.

Swinburne.

To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all the faces that I know, the most so. Blank there, painted on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless; significant of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain, too, a silent, scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, as if it were, withal, a mean, insignificant thing; as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and life-long, unsurrendering battle, against the world, affection all converted into indignation, an implacable indignation; slow, equable, implacable, silent, like that of a god! The eye, too, it looks out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, Why was the world of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this "voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us his "mystic, unfathomable song." The Face of Dante.

WHAT needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones

The labour of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid

Under a star-y pointing pyramid ?

Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a livelong monument.

Carlyle.

For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavouring Art
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepulchered, in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Milton.

XVII. MISCONCEPTIONS AND ABUSES.

Or all the faculties the imagination is most frequently misconceived. To many it is simply the faculty of hallucination. Even some painters of the realistic type have declared imagination a hindrance to artistic work. These entirely overlook the fact that the greatest realist must give imaginative feeling to a simple touch of his brush, or he is not an artist.

Imagination does not deceive. Deceit is an abuse of the faculty. It does not cause delusion; it may create artistic illusion, but in this it looks through the external to the internal, through the body to the spirit. It uses facts to find truth. "It is, indeed, pre-eminently a truthful and truth-seeing power, perceiving subtle aspects of truth, hidden relations, far-reaching analogies, which find no entrance to us by any other inlet."

Again, imagination is not extravagant; fancy may exaggerate, but the imagination, never. Imagination is not a drunken, a flippant, or a trivial faculty. It does not dissipate noble emotion, but lies at the heart of our deepest experience.

Again, imagination is not a mere decorative faculty; it sees and creates beauty, but it does not adorn superficially. Its beauty is unfolded from the heart. It is not a faculty for fantastic or fictitious visions. Its highest characteristic is depth of insight. It must not be judged by its perversions and diseases, or by its lower functions, but by its highest and noblest characteristics. Its climax is not the literal fact, but truth. It never acts apart from truth. It is the faculty of all faculties that deals with the heart of things and the heart of man.