imagination,
which are unnoticed by the man who experiences them in his waking
moments. Such is the reader of a poem, a romance, or history, the
spectator of a picture, who is able for the time to abstract himself
from surrounding objects, and who implicitly believes that he sees those
places and persons, or whatever the book or painter has described or
represented. If suddenly interrupted, he rouses himself, and may be said
to awake to the present reality of things, as if startled from a dream.

Wigan relates that a celebrated portrait painter worked with such
quickness and facility that he painted more than three hundred portraits
in a year. When he was asked the secret of his rapid execution and of
the faithfulness of the likeness, he replied, "When any one proposes to
have his portrait taken, I look at him attentively for half an hour,
while sketching his features on the canvas; I then lay the canvas aside
and pursue the same method with another portrait, and so on. When I wish
to return to the first, I take his person into my mind and place it
before me as distinctly as if he were actually present. I set to work,
looking at the sitter from time to time, since I am able to see him
whenever I look that way." Talma asserted that when he was on the stage,
he was able by mere force of will to transform his audience into
skeletons, which affected him with such emotion as to add force and
energy to his action. Abercromby speaks of a man who had the faculty of
calling up visions with all the vividness of reality whenever he
pleased, by strongly fixing his attention on mental conceptions which
corresponded to them. Yet he was a sane man, in the prime of life,
perfectly intelligent, and versed in practical affairs.

A very slight withdrawal of the attention from surrounding objects is
all that is necessary to enable artists and some other persons to call
up these images with vivid distinctness, since even in the waking state
the image may for the moment appear to be actually before them. Any one
might attain to the same power of verification if the transition from
the real to the merely ideal image were not in the waking state so
instantaneous and easy; whereas in a dream the state of illusion is
uninterrupted, and it is physiologically impossible for the mind to pass
immediately from the image, which is believed to be real, to the simply
representative idea of the thing.

Even in the waking state, the image and represent