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And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.
No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
the same may be said of society.
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