If you print these letters, I wish you would insert here fragments from that wonderful poem of Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.” There is almost no limit to the possibilities of the imagination; but to get the full power of it, one must trust one’s imagination. If you say to yourself constantly, as the mother says to the child, “But this is only play; this is not real,” you never can make real the things you have created in thought. The imagination itself is like a child and must be encouraged and believed in, or it cannot develop and do its perfect work. It is really fortunate for some of you that I am out here. I can do more for you here than there, because I have even greater faith in my imagination than I had before. The man who called this the play world has been trying all sorts of experiments with the power in himself. I have not his permission to tell the stories he tells me, but they would surprise you. For one thing, he helped his wife, after his so-called death, to carry out a joint plan of theirs which had seemed impossible to them before because of their lack of real faith. It was for the erection of a certain kind of house. But do not fancy that most people here are trying to build houses on earth. Far from it. Most of my fellow-citizens are willing to work where they are, and to let the earth alone. Of course there are “dreamers” like me, who are not satisfied with one world, and who like to have their fingers in both; but they are rather rare, as poets are rare on earth. To most men the world they happen to be in is sufficient for the time being. There is a certain fancy of mine, however, which it will amuse me to help realise on earth. You may not know that I am doing it, but I shall know. I would not, “for the world,” as you say, disturb anybody by even the thought that I am fussing around in affairs which now are theirs. But if, unseen and unfelt, I can help with the power of my self-confident imagination, there will be no harm done, and I shall have demonstrated something. LETTER XXIX AN UNEXPECTED WARNING