hood or womanhood, when we imagine what we are to be and to become in fortune and success, thus including more or less distinctly what we ought to be in character and in performance, the imagination is, in this relation, ethical.

Think, now, of the importance, the benefits, the influence, of this faculty. The vividness and force of composition depend largely upon its skilful use. The orator requires it. His chief resources are illustration and resemblance. Without it, the painter and the sculptor would have no enlarged sense, no suggestiveness, to exhibit in color and in stone. As for the poet, according to his measure of it is he higher or lower:

'It may be taken for an axiom, that where we get great creative power, many-sidedness, and a conjunction of grand conceptions with the emotional sublime, there we have first-class poetry, and where any of these qualities are wanting, first-class poetry is not. It may also be as readily granted, that the class of poetry next in order is where there is a lack of creative power, but frequent instances of either of the two sources of the sublime combined with a prominent manifestation of the representative faculty. From this level the next step in the descent to the third or æsthetic order, is the rarity of any instance of the sublime, with great vigour of description, in which the spiritual dominates over the material. The lowest step of all lands us on that ground where we get inferior combinations of the imaginative and representative elements in second-rate descriptive poetry, and where flights of fancy and sallies of wit are substituted for sublime bursts of passion, and the spiritual manifestations of beauty. This is not the sphere of ethereal types, but of material embodiments. Beyond the frontier of this sensuous region, we come in contact with the dreary wastes of the actual, in which most common-place characters are content to spin out the great bulk of their lives.'1

Have we not seen that half of our language is its work, losing its poetic aspect by commonness of use? 'Thinkest thou,' says Carlyle, 'there were no poets till Dan

1 J. Devey: Comparative Estimate of Modern English Poets.

Chaucer? No heart burning with a thought which it
could not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape
and coin a word for- what thou callest a metaphor, trope,
or the like? For every word we have, there was such a
man and poet.
The coldest word was once a glowing new
metaphor, and bold, questionable originality. The very
attention, does it not mean an attentio, a stretching-to?
Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of,
which none had yet named—when this new poet first felt
bound and driven to name it. His questionable origi-
nality and new glowing metaphor was found adoptable,
intelligible, and remains our name for it to this day.'

It is of inestimable value to us all. The poet, the orator, the artist, can convey to us no fuller, deeper meaning than we have soul to receive. The same heavens are over the astronomer and his dog. The president and the pig look upon the many-colored morning and evening. But what a different world it is to dog and astronomer, pig and president! Science pulls the snow-drop to shreds, but whence comes its idea of suffering hope and pale confident submission? One person, viewing Niagara Falls, thinks it a good place for sponging cloth. Why does another cry out, God of grandeur, what magnificence!' Beyond the body's needs of bread, clothing, lodging, and medicine, who sees that earth and sky are starred with loveliness, and, withal, reads the lesson thereof?

Least of all are the practical uses of the imagination to be overlooked. It lifts us above ourselves, creates for us standards of attainment to which we may aspire, and without the vision of which none can rise. It looks from the actual to the desirable and possible, conceiving that which is more perfect than the human eye hath seen or the human hand hath wrought. The ideal is the bow of promise which we shall never reach, but without which we

The beasts have their para

should not be what we are. dise around them— man's is ever before him, moving forward as he moves.

Whatever our ideals are, false or true, elevated or low, they are sure to exert a most healthful or a most baneful influence upon satisfaction and success. It is much less what we are and possess than what we imagine that we ought to be and to have, that is decisive of happiness and misery.

All that can be said, then, tends to enforce the culture and discipline of the imagination-imagination as distinguished from that seductive and enervating state known as reverie or castle-building. This culture is needed primarily to counteract the proneness to materialism and earthiness. It is needed to enable us to see the great power, beauty, and wisdom of things; to subordinate the means of living to the ends of life, to beget in us a noble unrest, an ever-renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life. The very existence of the imagination is proof that it may be improved to our good, or neglected and abused to our harm. Of direct means, the whole is comprised in two words food and exercise. Seek true visions, dream noble dreams. Goethe advises us to have constantly before our eyes, that is, in the room we most frequent, some work of the best attainable art. Cultivate fellowship with nature, and in literature surround yourselves with the genial presence of the high-minded.

ESTHETICS OF EXPRESSION - TASTE.

Taste, like Imagination, is a word which has been forced to extend its services far beyond the point to which philosophy would have confined them. It is a metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive -to intellectual acts and operations.-WORDSWORTH.

W

HEN in the sphere of sense certain objects are brought in contact with the appropriate physical organ, there is first an affection of the sensibility, a mere feeling, of which we are cognizant; then a judgment that the object so affecting us possesses such and such qualiis sweet, sour, bitter, etc. In other words, we say

ties

-

that the thing tastes so and so.

When, again, we regard

a splendid sunset or a noble statue, we are conscious of an emotion-an emotion of pleasure and delight; then find ourselves exclaiming mentally or aloud, 'How beautiful!' or 'How grand!' We may presently observe with careful eye the details, and the relation of the several parts to the whole, seeking to know what it is in the one or the other that pleases us; and we are gratified the more or the less, in proportion as we ascertain its merits or defects.

Between the two cases there is some analogy, sufficient to suggest a transfer of name from the former to the latter; and hence, in many languages, the power of perceiving the beautiful and sublime in nature, art, and literature, is called Taste. High sensibility, lovingness, which is an attribute of all noble minds, is, indeed, the foundation, the spring, the life. There is neither motive

nor opportunity for the exercise of perceptive power, if pleasure be wanting. Hence Burke's definition of taste'That faculty or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts'; and Alison's "That faculty of the mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature and art.' Philosophically, however, the word denotes the intellectual rather than the emotional element of the process. The two are closely related, yet clearly distinguishable. The latter is passive-is the capability of being moved; the former is active—is the capability of judging as to the beauty or deformity, merit or demerit, of a thing-of discerning the fitness of particular causes to produce in us particular effects. The one is more native; the other, more acquired. The peasant and the savage have lively sensibility, but little or no discrimination. The accomplished musician has most critical knowledge, but the listening and wondering child, who judges scarcely or not at all, may feel most. Of taste, therefore, in the metaphorical meaning, it has been said with much justness: The essential element which constitutes it, pertains to the reason; it is, in truth, only one of the forms of this sovereign power, which takes different names according to the objects which it deals with reason, properly speaking, when it employs itself in the sphere of speculative truth; conscience, when it reveals to us truths moral and practical; tuste, when it appreciates the beauty and suitableness of objects in the real world, or of works of art.'1

The

Nor is taste to be confounded with imagination. first may be essentially defective where the second exists in a high degree, as happens always with children and barbarians, and not infrequently with the productions of

1 Benard.