By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd by concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.

Mark the music.

[Enter PORTIA and NERISSA at distance.

Por. That light we see is burning in my hall;

How far that little candle throws its beams!

So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Ner.

When the moon shone, we did not see the candle.

Por. So doth the greater glory dim the less;

A substitute shines brightly as a king,

Until a king be by; and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters. Music! hark!

Ner. It is your music, madam, of the house.
Por. Nothing is good, I see, without respect;
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.
Ner.

Silence bestows that virtue on it, madam.
Por. The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark,
When neither is attended; and, I think,

The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season season'd are
To their right praise and true perfection!
Peace, hoa! the moon sleeps with Endymion,
And would not be awak'd!

(Music ceases.)

Por. He knows me as the blind man knows the cuckoo,

By the bad voice.

Lor.

Merchant of Venice.

Dear lady, welcome home.

Shakespeare.

In reading these lines by Matthew Arnold, a number of questions naturally spring up in the mind. What is meant by Obermann; what baths are referred to; what special place is in the mind of the poet? We read the whole poem, and find from the poet's notes that it was written after the death of Senancour, the author of " Obermann," and that the sympathies of Matthew Arnold have been deeply stirred. We find also that the "abandoned baths" are the baths of Leuk, and that the "poem was conceived, and partly composed, in the valley going down from the foot of the Gemmi Pass towards the Rhone."

On reading these facts, those who have visited the place may remember the scene; but if they enjoy the poem, though they may begin with memory, the whole situation will be very soon transformed in their minds. They will read the poem, not with an act of memory, but with the aid of imagination. Poetry ex

presses the universal element in human nature.

Arnold's words

He meant to

do not appeal to memory, but to a higher faculty. place in every reader's mind a background for certain feelings. The poem is not a literal description of what he himself saw.

Some one prepared a book, locating all the events referred to in Tennyson's "Idyls of the King;" but the poet was displeased, — it was foreign to the true spirit of poetry. Tennyson had endeavored to appeal to the universal heart and imagination of mankind. He had written no book of description or travel, and any attempt to locate literally the scenes would be only a hindrance to the universal appreciation or true realization of the poetry.

Poetry appeals to the imagination; memory and conception may furnish the materials, but imagination idealizes and universalizes them. True poetry is but suggestion. This is the function of poetry and art. Before a literal object, no two minds have the. same impression. Art alone can awaken a corresponding feeling and impression in different hearts. It does this by an appeal to the imagination. This is the creative power, the faculty which conceives essentials rather than accidentals, and realizes the relations of objects to one another and to human feeling.

It uses

Imagination is most active in that which is familiar. the simplest, the most insignificant objects and the most familiar scenes as the material for its exalted flights. Notice in illustration of this the following translation of a poem in which the writer speaks of her own home:

Of nearly every great scene, Mont Blanc or Niagara, for instance, most persons carry an imaginary picture as well as a memory of the place itself. In reading a poem describing such objects, it is the imagined scene which is foremost. After long familiarity with some locality, the imagination and memory tend to become one. But even in this case there are a thousand memories of different sunrises and sunsets, of different aspects of light, of various conditions of atmosphere; and in reading, it is hardly possible to apply any one of these specially. In nearly all cases the scene is imagined to suit the mental attitude of the moment.

Many persons in travelling see nothing, because they do not use the imagination. A mere superficial glancing at some scene, a rushing through a country on an express train, gives very little food for imagination. The true traveller endeavors to blend his imaginative conception with the observation of the scene itself.

Imagination is not antagonistic to observation. In order to read a poem well, we analyze it, we study all possible references, we look up facts regarding places mentioned, we refer to events of history, we study the lives of any historical characters which may be referred to; but in the act of reading, all this knowledge is so assimilated that it furnishes only a background or material for imaginative conception.

Memory recalls specific facts and objects; but imagination supplies situations and living relations. Imagination takes facts, and gives them vital kinship to other facts. It deals not with the letter, but with the spirit. "Imagination," says Wordsworth, "has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition.

"half way down

Hangs one who gathers samphire,'

is the well-known expression of Shakespeare, delineating an ordinary image upon the cliffs of Dover." Here is found" a slight exertion of the faculty which I denominate imagination, in the

use of one word: neither the goats nor the samphire-gatherer do literally hang, as does the parrot or the monkey; but, presenting to the senses something of such an appearance, the mind in its activity, for its own gratification, contemplates them as hanging.

"As when far off at sea a fleet descried

Hangs in the clouds :

Far off the flying Fiend.'

so seemed

Here is the full strength of the imagination involved in the word hangs, and exerted upon the whole image. First, the fleet, an aggregate of many ships, is represented as one mighty person, whose track, we know and feel, is upon the waters; but, taking advantage of its appearance to the senses, the Poet dares to represent it as hanging in the clouds, both for the gratification of the mind in contemplating the image itself, and in reference to the motion and appearance of the sublime objects to which it is compared."

PROBLEM VI. Read an extract, and call into exercise simply the memory: then read the same extract with an imaginative atmosphere, without perverting memory.

THE old trees

Which grew by our youth's home; the waving mass
Of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew;
The morning swallows with their songs like words, -
All these seem clear and most distinct amid
The fever and the stir of after years.

Browning.

PROBLEM VII. Read a description of some place, and show how the imagination can build upon memory, and act without perverting it.

O ROME! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone Mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.

What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, ye

Whose agonies are evils of a day!

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.