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imagination on action. The pleasures, disappointments, regrets, admonitions of the past, keep company with the mind in that living way which makes them effective counselors through this faculty; and, as the wisdom of the present is chiefly the gleanings of the past, our immediate purposes its ripened conclusions, the pictures of the fancy are as the reflectors which gather the otherwise diffused, fugitive light, and pour it all in on the working-point. But it is in the ideals of action and character, which are always distinctly present in noble minds, and hardly wholly disappear even with the lowest, that the most constant and valuable function of the imagination is seen. Through a conception of that which is more desirable in ends, more skillful in means, more wise in action, more graceful and winning in method, more pure and holy in purpose, more benignant and beautiful in presentation, imagination furnishes an embodiment of the truth nearest us, becomes an angel of light running before us, guiding our steps, scaling for us every steep of excellence, dropping back upon us words of encouragement and hope. To be destitute of an ideal, is to want the best motive of effort, is to lose direction, is to lack momentum, is to be dead, passively preyed on by the forces that have clutched us. Evil and death admit this inertia, goodness and life do not; and an imagination that looks out on fields of light that open vistas into the paradise of hope becomes an essential to all high resolve and cheerful effort. If the imagination is captivated with the past renewing its life with an art more cunning than that which first spread its colors, we have the poetical temperament; if the imagination keeps close at home in the present, it gives the practical disposition; or if it pushes out with a noble impulse of exploration and improvement into the future, it discloses to the full the spiritual force of man.