ams, we see "the light that never was on sea
or land," we hear the sounds that never yet were heard by waking ears.

It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us. Awake,
we never imagine anything; we merely alter, vary, or transpose. We give
another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around us, and
obtain another pattern; but not one of us has ever added one tiniest
piece of new glass to the toy.

A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller, and another race of people
larger than the race of people that live down his own streets. And he
also sees a land where the horses take the place of men. A Bulwer Lytton
lays the scene of one of his novels inside the earth instead of outside.
A Rider Haggard introduces us to a lady whose age is a few years more
than the average woman would care to confess to; and pictures crabs
larger than the usual shilling or eighteen-penny size. The number of so
called imaginative writers who visit the moon is legion, and for all
the novelty that they find, when they get there, they might just as well
have gone to Putney. Others are continually drawing for us visions of
the world one hundred or one thousand years hence. There is always a
depressing absence of human nature about the place; so much so, that one
feels great consolation in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves
shall be comfortably dead and buried before the picture can be realized.
In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and
happy, and all the work is done by electricity.

There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds
to come. One is reminded of those pictorial enamel-paint advertisements
that one sees about so often now, in which all the members of an
extensive household are represented as gathered together in one room,
spreading enamel-paint over everything they can lay their hands upon.
The old man is on a step-ladder, daubing the walls and ceiling with
"cuckoo's-egg green," while the parlor-maid and the cook are on their
knees, painting the floor with "sealing-wax red." The old lady is doing
the picture frames in "terra cotta." The eldest daughter and her young
man are making sly love in a corner over a pot of "high art yellow,"
with which, so soon as they have finished wasting their time, they
will, it is manifest, proceed to elevate the piano. Younger brothers
and sisters are busy freshening up the chairs and tables with
"strawberry-jam p