It is the office and function of the imagination to renew life in lights
and sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soul
back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush
burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of God. And it
works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the
warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superstition and fable
as if they were passed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white
light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the
disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead
eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathy
which puts us in relation with all nature, before that mighty
circulation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as the
blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will
imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott
weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated
to the desires of the mind."
It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and
language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we
know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like
the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it
singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to
give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in
narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same
original force as if they had life in themselves.