ling factory into
the open fields on the wings of her _imagination_. She was a swift,
sure, little workman; her eye watched the stuff before her and measured
it truly; her hands obeyed her eye, did her work efficiently, and "kept
her job." But the eye of her imagination had been opened in the
literature class and kept her soul alive in spite "of her job." This is
a true story. It has significance for you and me.

If through the use of her imagination a little factory girl can escape
from the monotony of bag-folding, and find freedom and joy in the lyric
world Shelley has created, what limit need be set to our emancipation
through the development of this faculty?

But emancipation is but one result of such development. Listen to David
as he stands with his harp before the King in Browning's story of
_Saul_. Already his song has released the monarch from the depths of
his great despair, but now comes the boy's cry:

What spell or what charm
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should I urge
To sustain him where song had restored him?...
Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky:
And I laughed--"Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks,
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know!
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains,
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for."
And now those old trains
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the string
Of my harp made response to my spirit....

So the imagination of the young shepherd boy had not only disregarded
the limits of his actual environment and escaped in fancy to the great
world beyond, but so vividly had he realized that world _through his
imagination_ that his sympathies had been made broad to comprehend a
monarch's need and his song potent to meet it. Experience alone gives
comprehension. We are prone to think that experience is limited by our
actual horizon. We need to know that experience has no limit save that
which i