To look at men and women through the vision of the
Imagination is to see a very different race than that which meets our
common sight. To this larger vision, within which the past supplements
the present, the great army of men and women moves to a solemn and
appealing music. The pathos of life touches them with an indescribable
dignity; the work of life gives them an unspeakable nobility. Under
the meanest exterior there are one knows not what tragedies of denied
hopes and unappeased longings; behind the mask of evil there shines one
knows not what struggling virtue overborne by impulses that flow from
the past like irresistible torrents. Hidden under all manner of
disguises--weakness, poverty, ignorance, vulgarity--there waits a world
of ideals never realised but never lost; the fire of aspiration burns
in a thousand thousand souls that are maimed and broken, bruised and
baffled, but which still survive. Is not this the unquenchable spark
that some day, in freer air, shall break into white flame? It is the
Imagination only that discerns in a thousand contradictions, a thousand
obscurities, the large design to be revealed when the ring of the
hammer has ceased, the dust of toil been laid, the scaffolding removed,
and the finished structure suddenly discloses the miracle wrought among
those who were blind.
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