One morning, when we had been talking about the delight of seclusion, Rosalind said that, although the silence and repose were really medicinal, people had never seemed so attractive to her as now when she remembered them under the spell of the island.

It seemed to her, as she recalled them now, that the dull people had an interest of their own, the vulgar people were not without dignity, nor the bad people without noble qualities.

The Poet, who had evidently been giving himself the luxury of dreaming, declared that we cannot know people save through the Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at the bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, and personal experience.

A fact taken by itself and detached from the whole of which it is part is always hard, bare, repellent; it must be seen in its relations if one would perceive its finer and inner beauty; and it is the Imagination alone which sees things as a whole.

The theologians who have stuck to what they call logic have spread a veil of sadness over the world which the poets must dissipate.