ngeing
soles of feet. It is lambent annihilation.

Sec. 3. The imagination seizes always by the innermost point.

Such is always the mode in which the highest imaginative faculty seizes
its materials. It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of
any kind, it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the very central
fiery heart, nothing else will content its spirituality, whatever
semblances and various outward shows and phases its subject may possess,
go for nothing, it gets within all fence, cuts down to the root, and
drinks the very vital sap of that it deals with: once there it is at
liberty to throw up what new shoots it will, so always that the true
juice and sap be in them, and to prune and twist them at its pleasure,
and bring them to fairer fruit than grew on the old tree; but all this
pruning and twisting is work that it likes not, and often does ill; its
function and gift are the getting at the root, its nature and dignity
depend on its holding things always by the heart. Take its hand from off
the beating of that, and it will prophesy no longer; it looks not in the
eyes, it judges not by the voice, it describes not by outward features,
all that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms from within.

Sec. 4. It acts intuitively and without reasoning.

It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this
penetrating, possession-taking faculty, imagination. Be it so, the name
is of little consequence; the faculty itself, called by what name we
will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual power of man. There is
no reasoning in it, it works not by algebra, nor by integral calculus,
it is a piercing, Pholas-like mind's tongue that works and tastes into
the very rock heart, no matter what be the subject submitted to it,
substance or spirit, all is alike, divided asunder, joint and marrow,
whatever utmost truth, life, principle, it has, laid bare, and that
which has no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its original
smoke at a touch. The whispers at men's ears it lifts into visible
angels. Vials that have lain sealed in the deep sea a thousand years it
unseals, and brings out of them Genii.

Every great conception of poet or painter is held and treated by this
faculty. Every character that is so much as touched by men like
Aeschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, is by them held by the heart; and
every circumstance or sentence of their being, speaking, or seeming, is
seized