of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all men.  Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect; and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness, and its consequent failure.  These books, then, are not national, but human, and record certain phases of man’s nature, certain stages of his moral progress.  They are gospels in the lay bible of the race.  It will remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and harmonious development.

I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a different category.  Though they mark the very highest level of human genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the individual mind.  The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain definite conditions.  We all of us may be in the position of Macbeth or Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of our common nature and not of our experience.  But with the four books I have mentioned our relation is a very different one.  We all of us grow up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time, sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the intellect alone.  Therefore I set these books by themselves.  I do not mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them, in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence, and insures their immortality.

THE IMAGINATION[1]

[Footnote 1:  A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser.]

Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet.  With these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every hand.  Through imagination alone is something like a creative power possible to man.  It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age to age.  Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of expression also, which is the office of all art.