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Wordsworth what is meant by the 
Reverend watching of each still report 
That Nature utters from her rural shrine; 
we must learn with him 
To look on Nature with a humble heart, 
Self-questioned where it does not understand, 
And with a superstitious eye of love; 
and to commune with the glorious universe must continue through 
life, with us as it did with him— 
The first and virgin passion of a soul. 
The most important relation, however, between literature 
and painting arises under the head of the imagination ; and of 
this I propose briefly to speak. It may be granted thatin all art 
expression is the first essential; and no part of the artistic gift is 
more largely native than this. When the poet and the painter 
are born it is this which is born with them—power of language, 
the expression of literature; power of outline and colour, the 
expression of painting. But if expression be the earliest factor in 
art and absolutely essential, imagination is incomparably the 
greatest. Granted expression, with an artistically receptive tem- 
perament, and a certain kind of artistic work is possible, even 
without imagination. The highest and best work, however, is 
never reached, or even entered upon at all, unless the artist has 
been endowed with this—the most bountiful gift of all those 
which the Muses have it in them to bestow. And, it must be 
added, with imagination the smallest and most circumscribed 
productions become valuable. 
It will be worth while, therefore, to ask what it is that we 
mean by imagination ? and further, perhaps, how it differs from 
what we call fancy? These two words are used so loosely, and 
in so many senses, and with such overlapping confusion, that it 
is no wonder our ideas with regard to them should often be of 
the vaguest character. Many a student of literature and of 
painting, I should suppose, must have sought in vain for a dis- 
tinct and cohesive definition. At the root of much error on this 
subject there lies the way in which we use the words “ real’’ and 
“unreal.” We make the “real,” in common phrase, to be the 
antithesis of the “ideal.” Itis no such thing. We make the 
‘unreal’ to be synonymous with what we are pleased to call the 
“imaginative”. It is no such thing. To say that a thing is 
“merely imaginative” is our way of condemning it. The true 
antithesis is this—the ideal and the material. Unreality has no 
necessary connection with either. The material is real: the 
ideal is certainly not less so. 
And now, let us ask: what is it to exercise the imagination ? 
For clearness’ sake the answer had better be given by successive 
statements. It is, of course, first and primarily, to make an image 
in the mind. But it is more than this—it is to embody in a 
