vital sympathies and understandings; human thought to human thought, hope to hope, motive to motive. Life, and the word of life, is the secret of all interest; the universe key, in things, events, persons, scriptures. We, and all about us, are syllables of an infinite revelation. They may call it evolution, for a new name, if they will, but it is what God tells us, of ourselves and Him, all the same. He talks to us with His fingers, — because we are deaf and dumb, in His creation and orderings, in our very own nature, aspirations, efforts.

-

Our words and parables grow from His vaster signs and meanings, and utter our individual perceptions. All language, all communication, is but fragmentary, drawn from first language, which is that wherein "day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge," and in which all things are told in parables, even to the parable of human experience.

Imagination is not unreality. I want to put a thought into your minds about this, that may even defend you against some "assaults of the devil.”

Faith is often set at naught as a form of the

imagination. That objection is an evidence. Faith is an imaging; it is a "showing forth of things unseen."

"That is your conception," doubters say; "it is not mine." Very well; that does not make out mine or Saint Paul's

You have not got it, that is all.

a delusion.

This may, I think, be accepted as an axiom: knowledge, of some sort, precedes, underlies, imagination. You can conceive of nothing that you have not, in whole or in part, witnessed or experienced. It is somewhere in you; or somehow, veritably, you are put in touch with it. You cannot absolutely originate, any more than you can create. You can but see, feel, receive impressions; lay up fact in yourself to illustrate fact beyond yourself.

A descriptive scene is nothing to you unless you can construct its picture, -grander, fuller though it may be than any that you have literally looked upon,- from bits and lines you do know. A little hill you are familiar with types to you a noble mountain; some abrupt declivity an awful precipice; a lake, a pond, forecasts the sea. If you had lived upon an arid plain, you could not conceive of either.

Did you never find yourself, when you thought you were imagining, only recollecting? Did a house, a room, in a story, never suddenly resolve itself into one you had visited or lived in? Did you never wake with a start out of the fiction and exclaim, "Why, here I where I have actually been! The place always turns into a real, old place that I have known before!"?

am,

You simply cannot imagine an unreal thing. If it is thinkable, it is, somewhere. And so I say imagination is founded on all the realities we have; it is the mirrored reflection of the true.

And when we come to spiritual faiths and insights, they can make no satisfying grasp of anything that has not an existence to which something in us directly assents and testifies, call it intuition, or what you will.

The consciousness of the world we are being born into, spiritually, is that from which we read and reason in the things we see. It is the Word and Reason of the things. "The invisible things are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”

Each soul sees its own things, in its own sphere. "No man hath ascended into heaven save the son of man which is in heaven." John was "in the Spirit on the Lord's Day," when he beheld the wonderful heavenly panorama of eternal verities under earthly types, rolling its awful majesty around Patmos. Another man would have stood beside him and seen nothing but ragged rocks and misty sea and clouds and lightnings in a storm-filled sky. "Two shall be together: one shall be taken, and the other left."

"Where the body"- the central Truth “is, there shall the eagles of a far, inseeing thought—" be gathered together." Saint John was the Eagle of the Evangelists.

V

ABOUT POETRY

IN our last study together, we arrived at this point:

Imagination, in its essence and legitimate use, is the presentiment of the true.

The acceptance of this principle will lead us, I think, to a further clear and fundamental understanding: that Poetry is nothing less than the very Reality of which Imagination catches sight.

Therefore we must not confound it with poetical work, in which the thing itself has been more or less adequately presented.

Poetry is not a thing written; that is, it is not in the writing. Words only endeavor to formulate it; or rather to suggest it indicatively. The poetry is far within the poem, if it is there at all; indeed, language is never anything but vehicle.

Poetry is not even First Language. First