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recourse in order to convey his meaning and to fulfil 

 his mission ? Who that has ever revelled in the orna- 

 mentation of the Renaissance, in the extraordinary 

 transitions from the animal to the vegetable, from faunic 

 to floral forms, and from these again to almost purely 

 geometric curves, who has not felt that these imagin- 

 aries have a claim to recognition very similar to that of 

 their congeners in Mathematics ? How is it that the 

 grotesque paintings of the middle ages, the fantastic 

 sculpture of remote nations, and even the rude art of 

 the Prehistoric Past, still impress us, and have an 

 interest over and above their antiquarian value ; unless 

 it be that they are symbols which, although hard of 

 interpretation when taken alone, are yet capable from 

 a more comprehensive point of view of leading us 

 mentally to something beyond themselves, and to truths 

 which, although reached through them, have a reality 

 scarcely to be attributed to their outward forms ? 



Again, if we turn from art to letters, truth to nature 

 and to fact is undoubtedly a characteristic of sterling 

 literature ; and yet in the delineation of outward nature 

 itself, still more in that of feelings and affections, of the 

 secret springs of character and motives of conduct, it 

 frequently happens that the writer is driven to imagery, 

 to an analogy, or even to a paradox, in order to give 

 utterance to that of which there is no direct counterpart 

 in recognized speech. And yet which of us cannot 

 find a meaning for these literary figures, an inward 

 response, to imaginative poetry, to social fiction, or 

 even to those tales of giant and fairyland written, 

 it is supposed, only for the nursery or schoolroom? 

 But in order thus to reanimate these things with a 

 meaning beyond that of the mere words, have we not 

 to reconsider our first position, to enlarge the ideas 



