ve facts of the organism always remain in the
visible world, so that there can be no actual passage from one to the
other, for an immaterial fact cannot be changed into a material
one:--association, simultaneousness, correlation may obtain between
them, but nothing more.

Saint Thomas Aquinas asserts 'that in our present state of degradation
the intellect comprehends nothing without an image.' Language is in
reality the association of material facts to facts of the will, heart,
and intellect. Apparently insufficient to give a full idea of material
things alone, it would seem almost impossible that it should ever be
able to express the facts of the invisible world; but the human spirit,
in accordance with the mental law impressed upon it by the Hand Divine,
seizes the analogies of the _moral_ phenomena with the phenomena of
_nature_, and, seeing physical facts used as symbols by the Creator to
convey ethical, also instinctively uses them to express the facts of the
moral world; and thus is born the _human Word_ which, invisibly
ploughing the waves of the unseen air, can convey the most subtile
thought, the most evanescent shade of feeling, the wildest, darkest, and
deepest emotion. Language is man's expression of the finite, with its
infinite meanings modified by the extent of his intelligence and his
power of expression. It is truly a universal possession, but every man
gifts it with his own individualities, his own idiosyncrasies. The
style, one might almost say, is the man.

Thus the imagery of language finds its base in the very essence of our
being. The poet is one gifted to seize upon these hidden analogies, to
read these mystic symbols, and, through the force of his own
imagination, to reveal them to his brethren in truth and love.

The imagination has two distinct functions. It combines, and by
combination creates new forms; it penetrates, analyzes, and realizes
truths _discoverable by no other faculty_.

An imagination of high power of combination seizes and associates at the
_same moment all_ the important ideas of its work or poem, so that while
it is working with any one of them, it is at the same instant working
with and modifying them all in their several relations to it. It never
once loses sight of their bearings upon each other--as the volition
moves through every part of the body of a snake at the same moment,
uncoiling some of its involute rings at the very instant it is coiling
others. This facult