In the first place, then, the use of poetry is to nourish the imagination. I have spoken earlier of the impossibility of fulfilling the higher functions of life without this faculty. A common error regards imagination as a quality which has to do with rare and exceptional experiences; as a power of inventing whimsical and impossible thoughts; as a sort of jester to beguile idle moments of the mind. In reality imagination is to the mental being what blood is to the physical man. Upon it the intellect and the emotional consciousness alike depend for nourishment. Without it the mind is powerless to seize or to make really its own anything which lies outside of actual experience. Without it the broker could not so fully realize his cunning schemes as to manipulate the market and control the price of stocks; without it the inventor could devise no new machine, the scientist grasp no fresh secret of laws which govern the universe. It is the divine power in virtue of which man subdues the world to his uses. In a word, imagination is that faculty which distinguishes man from brute. It is the beginning of wisdom to know; it is the culmination of wisdom to feel. The intellect accumulates; the emotion assimilates. What we learn, we possess; but what we feel, we are. The perception acquires, and the imagination realizes; and thus it is that only through the imagination can man build up and nourish that inner being which is the true and vital self. To cultivate the imagination, therefore, is an essential--nay, more; it is the one essential means of insuring the progression of the race. This is the great office of all art, but perhaps most obviously is it the noble prerogative and province of poetry. "In the imagination," wrote Coleridge, "is the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being." To kindle into flame the dull embers of this god-like attribute is the first office of poetry; and were this all, it would lift the art forever above every cumbering material care and engrossing intellectual interest. In the second place, the use of poetry is to give man knowledge of his unrecognized experiences or his unrealized capacities of feeling. The poet speaks what many have felt, but what none save he can say. He accomplishes the hitherto impossible. He makes tangible and subject the vague emotions which disquiet us as if they were elusive ghosts haunting the dwelling of the soul, unsubdued and oppressive in their mystery. The joy of a moment he has fixed for all time; the throb gone almost before it is felt he has made captive; to the evasive emotion he has given immortality. In a word, it is his office to confer upon men dominion over themselves.