we can consult a guide book--but for a complete picture which shall impress us all our lives long, we must go to the inspired author whose prescience or second-sight enables him to be something more than a mere Baedeker. Endless examples of this second-sight faculty could be given. Take Shakespeare as the best of them. He could never have personally known Antony and Cleopatra. He did not live in the time of Julius Cæsar. He was not guilty of murder because he described a murder in _Macbeth_. He could not have been a “fellow-student” of Hamlet’s. And where do you suppose, among the grim realities of life, he could have met those exquisite creations, Ariel and Puck, if not in the heaven of his own peerless imagination, borne to him on the brilliant wings of his own thought, to take shape and form, and stay with us in our English language for ever! Walter Scott had never seen Switzerland when he wrote _Anne of Geierstein_. Thomas Moore never visited the East, yet he wrote _Lalla Rookh_. Charles Dickens never fought a duel, and never saw one fought, yet the duel between Mr. Chester and Haredale in _Barnaby Rudge_ is one of the finest scenes ever written. Because an author is able to describe a certain circumstance, it does not follow that he or she has experienced that very circumstance personally. Very often it may be quite the contrary. The most romantic descriptions in novels have often been written by people leading very hum-drum, quiet lives of their own. We have only to think of _Jane Eyre_, and to remember the prosy, dull days passed by its author, Charlotte Brontë. To refer once more to Hans Andersen--we all know that he never could have seen a Dresden China shepherdess eloping up the chimney with a Dresden China sweep. We know he never saw that dainty little shepherdess weeping on the top of a chimney because the world was so large, and because all her gilding was coming off. But when we are reading that fantastic little story, we feel he _must_ have seen it somehow, and we are conscious of a slight vexation that we never see such a curious and delightful elopement ourselves. This is a phase of the power of the pen--to make the beautiful, the quaint, the terrible, or the wonderful things of imagination seem an absolute reality.