Though the youth still pursues, he never overtakes his ideal. In the process of transmutation into life the ideal is injured and dwarfed. Just as the poet's vision is transcendently more beautiful than the song he writes upon the page; as the artist's dream is a glorious-creation, but his picture is only a photograph thereof; as the musician's song or symphony is but an echo of the ethereal music he heard in his soul, so every purpose and ideal is marred in the effort to give it expression and embodiment. These children of aspiration hold the secret of all progress for society. Just as of old artists drew the outline of glowing and glorious pictures, and then with bits of colored glass and precious stones filled up the mosaic, causing angels and seraphs to stand forth in lustrous beauty, so imagination lifts up before the youth its glowing plans and purposes, and asks him to give himself to the details of life in filling it up and perfecting a glorious character. The patterns of life are only given upon that holy mount where, midst clouds and darkness, dwell God and the higher imagination. But if the imagination has its use, it has its abuse also. If visions of truth and beauty can exalt, visions of vice can debase and degrade. In that picture where Faust and Satan battle together for the scholar's soul, the angels share in the conflict. Plucking the roses of Paradise, they fling them over the battlements down upon the heads of the combatants. When the roses fall on Faust they heal his wounds; when they fall on Satan they turn into coals of fire. Thus the imagination casts inspirations down upon the pure, but smites the evil into the abyss. The miseries of men of genius like Burns are perpetual warnings to youth against the riotings of imagination. There are poems, also novels and lurid scenes in the city, hanging pictures before the imagination and scorching the soul like flames of fire. For as of old so now, what a man imagineth in his heart that he is. For not what a man does outwardly, but what he dreams inwardly, determines his character.