_But not to visible Objects._--It is not limited, however, to _visible_ objects merely--is not a mere picture-forming, image-making power. It more frequently, indeed, fashions its creations after the conceptions which sight affords than those of the other senses; but it deals also with conceptions of sound, as in music, and the play of storm and tempest, and with other objects of sense, as the taste, the touch, pressure, etc. Thus the _gelidi fontes_ of Virgil is an appeal to the sense of delicious coolness not less than to that of sparkling beauty. A careful analysis of every act of the imagination will show, I think, a _sensible basis_ as the groundwork of the fabric--something seen, or heard, or felt--something said or done--some sensible reality--something which, however ideal and transcendental in itself and in reality, yet admits of expression in and through the senses; otherwise it were a mere conception or _abstraction_--a mere idea--not an imagination. § VII.--IMAGINATION LIMITED TO NEW RESULTS. The simple reproduction of the _past_, whether an object or perception, or sensation, or conception merely, the simple reproduction or bringing back of that to the mind, we have assigned as the office of another faculty. Imagination, we have said, departs from the reality, and gives you not what you have had before, but something new, other, different. It is not the simple image-making power, then, for mental reproduction gives you an image or picture of any former object of perception, _as_ you have seen it--a portrait of the past, true and faithful to the original. Some writers would differ from the view now expressed. Some of the Germans assign to imagination the double office of producing the new and reproducing the old; the latter they call imaginative reproduction. In what respect this latter differs from the faculty of mental reproduction in general, it is difficult to perceive. When I remember a word spoken, or a song, I have the conception of a _sound_, or a series of sounds. When I remember an object in nature, as a mountain, a house, etc., I have the conception of a material object, having some definite form, and figure, outline, proportion, magnitude, etc. The conception of the absent object presents itself in such a case, of course, as an image or picture of the object to the mental eye. It is as really the work of conception reproductive, however, to replace, in this case, the absent object as once perceived, as it is to bring back to mind any thing else that has once been before it; _e. g._, a spoken word or a date in history. We may, if we please, term this faculty, as employed on objects of sight, conception _imaginative_ and distinguish it from the same faculty as employed in reproducing other objects; but it were certainly better to appropriate the term imagination to the single and far higher province of creation--the office of conceiving the ideal under the form of the sensible.