There was no trace of any other human occupation, although we never
forgot those who had been before us in these enchanting scenes. 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. "I do not mean," he
added, "that there are not sombre and terrible aspects of life, but
that these things have been separated from the whole, and discerned
only in their bare and crushing isolated force.
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