resight of the day when the swords
then wielded for repression of liberty of thought would flash for its
emancipation. And here is Walter Scott ruined by the failure of his
publishers, just at the hour when nature whispered that he had
fulfilled his task and earned his respite. But he girded himself anew
for the battle, and sustained his grievous loss through the foresight
of the hour when the last debt would be paid and his again would be a
spotless name. And here is that youth, Emerson, looking out upon a
world full of noise and strife, full of the cries of slaves and the
warfare of zealots. He was sustained by the foresight of a day when
God would breathe peace o'er all the scene. With hope shining in his
face, he began to "take down men's idols with such reverence that it
seemed an act of worship." And what shall we more say? By the sight of
the invisible, Dante endured his scaffold; the heroes, hunted like
partridges upon the mountains, endured their caves and the winter's
cold; martyrs endured the scourge and fagot. In every age, the great,
by the sight of the invisible, have been lifted into the realms of
tranquillity. Outwardly, there may have been the roar and boom of
guns, but inwardly men were lutes with singing harps. As the
householder sitting by his blazing hearth thinks not of the sleet and
hail falling on the roof of slate, so the soul abides in peace over
which has been reared the castle and covert of God's presence.

How signal a place does the imagination hold in the realm of science
and invention! Reason itself is only an under-servant. It has no
creative skill. Memory makes no discoveries. But the imagination is a
wonder-worker. One day, chancing upon a large bone of the mammoth in
the Black Forest, Oken, the German naturalist, exclaimed: "This is a
part of a spinal column." The eyes of the scientist saw only one of
the vertebrae, but to that one bone his imagination added frame, limb
and head, then clothed the skeleton with skin, and saw the giant of
animals moving through the forest. In that hour the imagination
wrought a revolution in the science of anatomy. Similarly, this
creative faculty in Goethe gave botany a new scientific basis. Sitting
in his favorite seat near the castle of Heidelberg one day, the great
poet was picking in pieces an oak leaf. Suddenly his imagination
transformed the leaf. Under its touch the central stalk lifted itself
up and became the trunk of the tree; the veins of th