196 UNDER THE TREES. 



vided between hope and memory ; when memory 

 holds the chief place, the shadows are lengthening 

 and the day declining. 



It was one of the pleasures of the island that 

 we were alone upon it. There was no trace of 

 any other human occupation, although we never 

 forgot those who had been before us in these 

 enchanting scenes. One morning, when we had 

 been talking about the delight of seclusion, Rosa 

 lind said that, although the silence and repose 

 were really medicinal, people had never seemed so 

 attractive to her as now when she remembered 

 them under the spell of the island. It seemed to 

 her, as she recalled them now, that the dull people 

 had an interest of their own, the vulgar people 

 were not without dignity, nor the bad people with 

 out noble qualities. The Poet, who had evidently 

 been giving himself the luxury of dreaming, declared 

 that we cannot know people save through the 

 Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at 

 the bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, 

 and personal experience. A fact taken by itself 

 and detached from the whole of which it is 

 part is always hard, bare, repellant ; it must be 

 seen in its relations if one would perceive its 

 finer and inner beauty ; and it is the Imagination 

 alone which sees things as a whole. The theologi 

 ans who have stuck to what they call logic have 

 spread a veil of sadness over the world which the 

 poets must dissipate. &quot; I do not mean,&quot; he added, 



