thing too vague to be perceived except as a whole impression of
pleasure; a half-seen vision, doubtless, of the real flowers, of the
places where they grow; perhaps even a faint reminiscence, a dust of
broken and pounded fragments, of stories and songs into which roses
enter, or lilies, or clove-pinks.

Hereby hangs a whole question of aesthetics. Those three stone roses
are the type of one sort of imaginative art; of one sort of art which,
beyond or independent of the charm of visible beauty, possesses a charm
that acts directly upon the imagination. Such charm, or at least such
interest, may be defined as the literary element in art; and I should
give it that name, did it not suggest a dependence upon the written word
which I by no means intend to imply. It is the element which, unlike
actual representation, is possessed by literature as well as by art;
indeed, it is the essence of the former, as actual representation is of
the latter. But it belongs to art, in the cases when it belongs to it at
all, not because the artist is in any way influenced by the writer, but
merely because the forms represented by the artist are most often the
forms of really existing things, and fraught, therefore, with associations
to all such as know them; and because, also, the artist who presents
these forms is a human being, and as such not only sees and draws,
but feels and thinks; because, in short, literature being merely the
expression of habits of thought and emotion, all such art as deals with
the images of real objects tends more or less, in so far as it is a
human being, to conform to its type.

This is one kind of artistic imagination, this which I have rudely
symbolised in the symbol of the three carved roses--the imagination
which delights the mind by holding before it some charming or uncommon
object, and conjuring up therewith a whole train of feeling and fancy;
the school, we might call it, of intellectual decoration, of arabesques
formed not of lines and colours, but of associations and suggestions.
And to this school of the three carved roses in the Square of Purgatory
belong, among others, Angelico, Benozzo, Botticelli, and all those
Venetians who painted piping shepherds, and ruralising magnificent
ladies absorbed in day-dreams.

But besides this kind of imagination in art, there is another and
totally different. It is the imagination of how an event would have
looked; the power of understanding and showing how an act