NORTH. Who doubts--who does not know, and admire, and love Hope--in the ardent generous spirit--looking out from within the Eden of Youth into the world into which it shall, alas! fall? What is asked? That the spring-flowering of youth shall be prematurely blighted and blasted by winds frosty or fiery, which the set fruit may bear? Of course we hope beyond the reality, and it is God's gift that we do. TALBOYS. And why lay that Imagination which looks into Life with unmeasured ideas to the charge of the Poet alone? Herein every man is a Poet, more or less; and, most, every spirit of power--the hero, the saint, the minister of religion, the very Philosopher. Would we ask, sir, for a new law of nature? Upon the elements, fewer or more, which an anticipated experience gathers, a spirit impelled by the yearnings inseparable from self-conscious power, and mighty to create, works unchecked and unruled. What shall it do but build glorious illusions? NORTH. "The culture of Imagination,"--understanding thereby, first, in the Great Poets themselves, the intercourse of their own minds with facts which imagination vivifies, and with ideas which it creates--of humanity; and secondly, in all others, as poets to be or not to be, the reading of the Great Poets, Mr Stewart says--"does not diminish our interest in human life." Does not diminish! Quite the reverse. It extraordinarily deepens and heightens, increases and ennobles. For who are the painters, the authentic delineators and revealers of human life, outer and inner-- BULLER. Why, the Poets--the Poets to be sure--the Poets beyond all doubt-- NORTH. "Extremely apt to inspire the mind with false conceptions of it"--and so on. Why, the Faculty is there with a mission. It is its bounden office--its embassy from heaven--to exalt us above our earthly experience--to lift us into the ideal possibility of things. Thereby it is an "angel of Life," the white-winged good genius. The too sanguine hope is an adhering consequence, and the quelling of the hope is one of the penalties which we pay for Adam and Eve's coming through that Eastern Gate into this Lower World. TALBOYS. Of course, my dear sir, _every_ power has its dangers--the greater, the profounder, the more penetrating and vital the power, the greater the danger. But is this the way that a Philosopher begins to treat of a power--with hesitation and distrust--inauspiciously auspicating his inquiry? The common--the better--the true order of treatment is by Use and, Abuse--Use first. "Expectations above the level of our present existence!" Of course--that when the heaven on earth fails, we may have _learnt_ "to expect above the level of our present existence," and go on doing so more and more, till Earth shall fade and Heaven open.