Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact, downward from the law.  In low experience it divines the tendency of order, and descends on the other arc of this rainbow to construct the world, and the man that must be.  Imagination is the projection of each beyond himself.  A man shall not lift his meat to his lips without prophecy and a consulting of this oracle:  he shall first extend him to think the savor and satisfaction of the meat.  Shut into the horizon and the moment, we have this only organ of communication with all that is beyond; yet having here in rudiments and beginnings all that is beyond, we laugh at the old limits, and explore the universe through every dimension, through spaces beyond Space and times beyond Time.

If this old ball on which we are carried be no apple of Sodom, but sound and sweet to the core, insight must be confidence and satisfaction.  In the beginning of thought we enjoy mere glimpses and guesses, our hopes are rather wishes than hopes; we mount into flame when they come, we sink into ashes when they burn out and desert us.  The first glimmerings only beget a noble discontent.  Children are tired of matter before they know where to seek their own power; they seem to be cheated of themselves, their worthiness is unrecognized and unfed.  Companions, tasks, prospects are insufficient, they are bored and isolated, they sigh and mope; yet they are proud of this lukewarm longing, which does not quite avail, and keep diaries to record with protest the dulness of every day.  Sentimentality is initial genius.  Its complaint seems to contradict the cheerfulness of wisdom, yet it enjoys complaining; though life be not worth having on these conditions, it bottles every tear.  A weak sadness fills great space in literature, stocks the circulating library, and counts its Werthers by the thousand in every age.  Now we expect this malady, as we look for mumps and measles in the growing child.  It is feminine,—­unwilling to be weak, yet not able to stand and go.  The strong quickly leave it behind.

In his first novel Goethe burned out for himself this girlish green-sickness, and by a more vigorous demand began to take what he wanted from the world.  To the young, life seems splendid but inaccessible.  Its remoteness is the theme of every complaint; but when these windy wishes grow stern, inexorable, when a man will no longer beg, but gets on his feet to try a tussle with the world, he throws resolute arms around the Greatest, and finds in his bosom all that was so vast and so far.

Then we open paths, renew our society, enlarge our work, make elbow-room and head-room enough in the world.  Criticism is the shadow of the mind.  Insight is not sadness, but invigoration,—­is no sob or spasm, but clearness in the eye and calmness in the breast.  We misjudge it from partial examples:  the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of light distress and blind.  The poet is rapt, and