ion, the history of Washington's winter at Valley Forge
becomes a mere formal recital, and you can never get a view of the
snow-covered tents, the wind-swept landscape, the tracks in the snow
marked by the telltale drops of blood, or the form of the heartbroken
commander as he kneels in the silent wood to pray for his army. Without
the power to construct this picture as you read, you may commit the
words, and be able to recite them, and to pass examination upon them,
but the living reality of it will forever escape you.

Your power of imagination determines your ability to interpret literature
of all kinds; for the interpretation of literature is nothing, after
all, but the reconstruction on our part of the pictures with their
meanings which were in the mind of the writer as he penned the words,
and the experiencing of the emotions which moved him as he wrote. Small
use indeed to read the history of the centuries unless we can see in it
living, acting people, and real events occurring in actual environments.
Small use to read the world's great books unless their characters are
to us real men and women--our brothers and sisters, interpreted to us by
the master minds of the ages. Anything less than this, and we are no
longer dealing with literature, but with words--like musical sounds
which deal with no theme, or like picture frames in which no picture has
been set. Nor is the case different in listening to a speaker. His words
are to you only so many sensations of sounds of such and such pitches
and intensities and quality, unless your mind keeps pace with his and
continually builds the pictures which fill his thought as he speaks.
Lacking imagination, the sculptures of Michael Angelo and the pictures
of Raphael are to you so many pieces of curiously shaped marble and
ingeniously colored canvas. What the sculptor and the painter have
placed before you must suggest to you images and thoughts from your own
experience, to fill out and make alive the marble and the canvas, else
to you they are dead.

IMAGINATION AND SCIENCE.--Nor is imagination less necessary in other
lines of study. Without this power of building living, moving pictures
out of images, there is small use to study science beyond what is
immediately present to our senses; for some of the most fundamental laws
of science rest upon conceptions which can be grasped only as we have
the power of imagination. The student who cannot get a picture of the
molecules of