worthy of the imagination of Shakespere, yea, worthy of the creative
imagination of our God--the God who made the Shakespere with the
imagination, as well as evolved the history from the laws which that
imagination followed and found out.

In full instance we would refer our readers to Shakespere's historical
plays; and, as a side-illustration, to the fact that he repeatedly
represents his greatest characters, when at the point of death, as
relieving their overcharged minds by prophecy. Such prophecy is the
result of the light of imagination, cleared of all distorting dimness by
the vanishing of earthly hopes and desires, cast upon the facts of
experience. Such prophecy is the perfect working of the historical
imagination.

In the interpretation of individual life, the same principles hold; and
nowhere can the imagination be more healthily and rewardingly occupied
than in endeavouring to construct the life of an individual out of the
fragments which are all that can reach us of the history of even the
noblest of our race. How this will apply to the reading of the gospel
story we leave to the earnest thought of our readers.

We now pass to one more sphere in which the student imagination works in
glad freedom--the sphere which is understood to belong more immediately
to the poet.

We have already said that the forms of Nature (by which word _forms_ we
mean any of those conditions of Nature which affect the senses of man)
are so many approximate representations of the mental conditions of
humanity. The outward, commonly called the material, is _informed_ by,
or has form in virtue of, the inward or immaterial--in a word, the