infinite repose. The youth of an
untroubled world was in it. The joy of effortless activities breathed
through it. We felt that we were once more in the morning of the
world's day, and hope gave the keynote to all our thought. Life is
divided between hope and memory; when memory holds the chief place, the
shadows are lengthening and the day declining.

It was one of the pleasures of the island that we were alone upon it.
There was no trace of any other human occupation, although we never
forgot those who had been before us in these enchanting scenes. One
morning, when we had been talking about the delight of seclusion,
Rosalind said that, although the silence and repose were really
medicinal, people had never seemed so attractive to her as now when she
remembered them under the spell of the island. It seemed to her, as
she recalled them now, that the dull people had an interest of their
own, the vulgar people were not without dignity, nor the bad people
without noble qualities. The Poet, who had evidently been giving
himself the luxury of dreaming, declared that we cannot know people
save through the Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at the
bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, and personal
experience. A fact taken by itself and detached from the whole of
which it is part is always hard, bare, repellent; it must be seen in
its relations if one would perceive its finer and inner beauty; and it
is the Imagination alone which sees things as a whole. The theologians
who have stuck to what they call logic have spread a veil of sadness
over the world which the poets must dissipate. "I do not mean," he
added, "that there are not sombre and terrible aspects of life, but
that these things have been separated from the whole, and discerned
only in their bare and crushing isolated force. The real significance
of things lies in their interpretation, and the Imagination is the only
interpreter."

I had often had the same thought, and found infinite consolation in it;
indeed, I rested in it so securely that I would trust myself with far
more confidence to the poets than to the logicians. The guess of a
great poetic mind has as solid ground under it as the speculation of a
scientist; it differs from the scientific theory only in that it is an
induction from a greater number of significant facts. The Imagination
follows the arc until it "comes full circle;" observation halts and
waits for further si