the moral phenomena with the phenomena of nature, and, seeing physical facts used as symbols by the Creator to convey ethical, also instinctively uses them to express the facts of the moral world; and thus is born the human Word which, invisibly ploughing the waves of the unseen air, can convey the most subtile thought, the most evanescent shade of feeling, the wildest, darkest, and deepest emotion.  Language is man’s expression of the finite, with its infinite meanings modified by the extent of his intelligence and his power of expression.  It is truly a universal possession, but every man gifts it with his own individualities, his own idiosyncrasies.  The style, one might almost say, is the man.

Thus the imagery of language finds its base in the very essence of our being.  The poet is one gifted to seize upon these hidden analogies, to read these mystic symbols, and, through the force of his own imagination, to reveal them to his brethren in truth and love.

The imagination has two distinct functions.  It combines, and by combination creates new forms; it penetrates, analyzes, and realizes truths discoverable by no other faculty.

An imagination of high power of combination seizes and associates at the same moment all the important ideas of its work or poem, so that while it is working with any one of them, it is at the same instant working with and modifying them all in their several relations to it.  It never once loses sight of their bearings upon each other—­as the volition moves through every part of the body of a snake at the same moment, uncoiling some of its involute rings at the very instant it is coiling others.  This faculty is inconceivable, admirable, almost divine; yet no less an operation is necessary for the production of any great work, for by the definition of unity of membership above given, not only certain couples or groups of parts, but all the parts of a noble work must be separately imperfect; each must imply and ask for all the rest; the glory of every one of them must consist in its relation to the rest; neither while so much as one is wanting can any be right.  This faculty is indeed something that looks as if its possessor were made in the Divine image!

  ’The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,
  And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
  Wrought in a sad sincerity;
  Himself from God he could not free;
  He builded better than he knew;—­
  The conscious stone to beauty grew.’

EMERSON.

By the power of the combining imagination various ideas are chosen from an infinite mass, ideas which are separately imperfect, but which shall together be perfect, and of whose unity therefore the idea must be formed at the very moment they are seized, as it is only in that unity that their appropriateness consists, and therefore only the conception of that unity can prompt the preference.  Therefore he alone can conceive and compose who sees the whole at once before him.