analyse, and explain to the world of common sense, the nature of their incommunicable faculty. Voltaire's inhabitants of Saturn and Sirius, with their seventy-two and their thousand senses respectively, might as well attempt to make clear to the earth-born pigmy, whom they pitied as they talked, the secret of their complicated organisations. If, then, we are to examine this question at all, we must assume that it is within the ordinary jurisdiction of mankind, and take for granted, at present at least, that, vast as may be the difference between one imagination and another, it is still but a difference in degree, and not in kind.

There is, however, a new and original hypothesis, which it would be wrong to pass over in silence: that hypothesis, I mean, which has been advocated by Mr. Dallas, in his essay on 'The Gay Science,' with great ingenuity and zeal. He has done good service to all who busy themselves with investigation of mental phenomenon, by accumulating and discussing a number of recorded instances, in which the intellect is known to have worked, for the most part unconsciously, at times when the bodily frame was laid asleep. In this state it produces out of that work results sometimes natural to the producing mind, as when Coleridge, in an opium dream, created Kubla Khan; or as when a

lawyer, with his eyes shut, in the middle of the night, builds up an elaborate opinion on some point of law; but in other cases, again, other results wholly foreign to it and unexpected, as when persons, ignorant of music whilst awake, pour out in sleep their unremembered strains, imitating with accuracy and skill certain melodies which have, somehow or other, forced themselves in upon a latent sensibility of the brain. This latent sensibility, when thus called into action, Mr. Dallas describes as 'the hidden soul,' and identifies it with the creative imagination. Since his book, which promises to be an interesting and a valuable one, is but half completed, it would be premature to condemn this theory, which may be reinforced by fresh arguments and additional explanations. But I must frankly confess that I do not understand it now. I do not see how the great works which are meditated and wrought out in full day-light, with a perfect consciousness both of the means employed and of the ends they are directed to accomplish, can be referred to the hidden soul. Nor, again, do I perceive in what manner the organised memory and methodical arrangement of facts, by the help of which a barrister grapples with his point of law, whether he grapples with it at his chambers or on his bed, can be ranked under the faculty

of the imagination. Nay, it appears to me, as far as I can judge, that the hidden soul, which no doubt, for most men (Mr. Dallas, I think, has established that position), is more active than they could readily believe, executes its labours very much as the unhidden soul executes hers, at other times. I do not think it unlikely that some here, when boys at a public school, may have done Latin verses in a dream. I have, I know, more than once; though I never could remember anything higher up than the last two. But they, and I suppose their predecessors, were framed without any mysterious agency at all—they were framed by the same soul precisely, whatever that may be, which is set apart for the manufacture of fifth-form longs and shorts in an ordinary after twelve; nor could I ever discover that they were appreciably better, or appreciably worse, than if I had hammered them out upon the normal quarter of paper, whilst sitting at an orthodox desk. I settled the matter for myself in a careless sort of way, by supposing that different portions of the brain were unequally asleep, and that those portions nearest to wakefulness might exercise their energies, more or less, without breaking that bond which was yet enchaining the senses and the limbs. Nor does it seem to me that the accidental circum

stance of my remembering how I was engaged, instead of, as is perhaps more frequently the case, forgetting it altogether, can in any way affect the character of the mental operation itself.* At the same time, I readily admit that Mr. Dallas is an earnest student on all such subjects, and a conscientious thinker; I therefore wait with some impatience to hear if he has anything to add to his mental speculations. Meanwhile, I adhere to Shakespeare's much simpler creed that,

* The last time when this happened to me (not very many years ago) may be worth record, as illustrating the instantaneous effects of a change in the mental attitude during sleep. I found myself one morning at Mrs. Holt's again, bent over the well-remembered wooden desk, and writing verses, for which my tutor was waiting, upon Spring. I got on smoothly enough till I came to this couplet,—

Emicat omnis ager renovato flore rosarum,
Et passim herbosâ nube virescit humus.'

Here my critical faculty came into play, I doubted about 'herbosa nubes,' but so completely was I the Eton boy once more that I put the doubt aside by saying, 'Oh, I think it will do, and if my tutor does not like it, he may alter it, and be hanged to him' (an improper speech of Philip asleep, for which Philip awake begs pardon of the excellent Provost of King's); but the little shift of thought, involved in this, woke me instantly with the two lines in question on my lips. The preceding ones had drifted irrecoverably (without, I fancy, leaving the world much poorer) into the abyss of space; if no such hitch had occurred, my belief is that I should have roused myself, at my usual hour, without any memory of the transaction at all.

'As imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.'

From this point of view, the first constituent element of the imagination seems to be a particular form of memory, which presents its facts in groups, with all their attendant circumstances and details retraced to the life. It stretches out, as it were, into a spiritual gallery, holding and exhibiting a long series of pictures gathered from the past; one man recollects that such a thing has happened, another exactly how it happened, and this last kind of recollection is, no doubt, one of the main foundations on which the imagination has to rest. If we join to this a power of unlimited combination-out of all the contents of such a gallery, a power, as Shakespeare calls it, of bodying forth from the endless variety of things known, the forms of things unknown, and of turning them, by the help of language, into shapes-we have before us, I think, the imaginative faculty in the rough. I do not, however, say that he who possesses, or is possessed by such a faculty, is therefore a poet. I understand that mathematicians require a high degree of it to deal, for instance, with the dimensions and configurations of space, and probably with other parts of their science.