trait by Rembrandt, which also has its
strain of ideal elevation due to Rembrandt's virile selective
sensibility. To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it is worth
repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but
intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by
susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it
reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual
confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient
inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every
material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and
stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious
relations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not
that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being more
or less transiently and in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal vision
as to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; and
when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly
between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and
what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of
experience. Dante seems to have expressed these conditions perfectly in
that passage of the _Purgatorio_ where, after a triple vision which has
made him forget his surroundings, he says--

"Quando l'anima mia torno di fuori
Alle cose che son fuor di lei vere,
Io riconobbi i miei non falsi errori."--(c xv)

He distinguishes the ideal truth of his entranced vision from the series
of external facts to which his consciousness had returned. Isaiah gives
us the date of his vision in the Temple--"the year that King Uzziah
died"--and if afterwards the mighty-winged seraphim were present with
him as he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images of memory,
and did not cry "Look!" to the passers-by.

Certainly the seer, whether prophet, philosopher, scientific discoverer,
or poet, may happen to be rather mad: his powers may have been used up,
like Don Quixote's, in their visionary or theoretic constructions, so
that the reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or the continuous
strain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is
hard for our frail mortality to carry the burthen of greatness with
steady gait and full alacrity of perception. But he is the strongest
seer who can support the stress of