iving and dead, causing mountains and battle-fields,
with all distant scenes, to pass before the mind in solemn procession.

The Bank of England has indeed a mechanism that tests coins and throws
out all light weights. But judgment is an instrument testing things
invisible, weighing arguments and motives, testing principles and
characters. And the desires, are they not like unto the richly laden
argosies of commerce? And fancy, hath it not the skill of artist and
architect? Imagination, working in the realm of the useful, turns iron
into engines. Imagination, working in realms of the beautiful, turns
pigments into pictures. Imagination, working in the realms of thought,
can turn things true into sciences, and things good into ethical
systems. Well did the philosopher say that the greatest star is the
one standing at the little end of the telescope, the one looking, not
looked at nor looked for. When some Agassiz dredging the Atlantic
tells us what animals lived there a million years ago, the scientist's
mind seems an abyss deeper than the sea itself; and when Tyndall,
climbing to the top of the Matterhorn, reads on that rock-page all the
events of the ancient world, the mountain is dwarfed to an ant hill
and becomes insignificant in the presence of the mountain-minded
scholar. Hunters tell us that when crossing a swamp they leap from one
hummock of grass to another. But Herschel and Proctor, exploring the
heavenly world, step from star to star. The husbandman, squeezing a
cluster of grapes in his cup, does but interpret to us the way in
which the scholar squeezes planets and suns to brim the cup of
knowledge for man's thirsting soul. This vast and wondrous world
without is matched by man's rich and various mind within! Well did
Emerson exclaim, "Man, thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy
senses the nights and mornings, the summers and winters; carrying in
thy brain the geometry of the City of God, in thy heart all the bowers
of love, and all the realms of right and wrong."

Such being the nature of the mind, consider its prodigious
fruitfulness in thought. If all the processes of the mind were reduced
to material volume, the thoughts of each moment would fill a page, the
thoughts of each hour would fill a chapter, the thoughts of each day
would fill a volume, the emotions of a year would fill a small library
of many volumes. Value might be wanting, but not bulk. It is given to
the eye to behold the harvests w