But
somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
that the poet reintroduces us.
But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
broken.
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