THEN rode Geraint into the castle court, He look'd and saw that all was ruinous. Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound And while he waited in the castle court, Moves him to think what kind of bird it is Breaks from a coppice gemm'd with green and red, Or it may be the labour of his hands, So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said, It chanced the song that Enid sang was one Of Fortune and her wheel; and Enid sang: "Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud; Turn that wild wheel thro' sunshine, storm, and cloud : Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. "Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown : With that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. "Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands; "Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd: IX. SITUATION AND BACKGROUND. ONE of the most important functions of the imagination is its power to supply the natural surroundings of an object, action, or conception. Ordinary thinking, as has been shown, on account of the necessity of definite concentration, is apt to conceive ideas in isolation; but however adequate a conception may be, it cannot be truthfully expressed in isolation. Expression results from a synthetic product of the imagination. Natural expression is hardly possible without situation. The power of conceiving and feeling a background is most important; the most isolated fact must be brought into sympathetic relation with other things, and with the human soul, then expression becomes possible. The power to conceive a situation is the chief characteristic of a natural, effective reader or speaker. The expression of any truth must lift it into the realm of interest. Hence the relations of the human soul to the thought it conceives, and to the feeling of its life and kinship with other things, are the soul of all artistic expression. "It is where the bird is that makes the bird," said William M. Hunt. Certainly if science endeavors to tell what a thing is, art shows where it is. The elliptic relations of an object, or those which cannot be expressed in words, are the chief elements in all imaginative or dramatic power. These elements give any truth its interest and its influence over the human mind. Where these are lacking, everything is untruthful, unnatural, artificial, and dead. A situation or background in some form, or with some degree of vividness, is present in every act of the mind. If we read the simplest phrase, we find that there is not only an idea suggested, but that this idea is located or environed. The background, however, is especially important in poetry; it is the primary function of poetry to suggest and create a right background or relation for truth. Read, for example, some lines from one of the simplest and most popular of poems; and we find from first to last, not an isolated conception, but a vivid picture of every object as a part of a living scene: AT eve they all assembled: then care and doubt were fled; "The night is growing darker, ere one more day is flown, Nothing she heard around her (though shouts rang forth again); With trembling haste and breathless, with noiseless step she sped; Adelaide Procter. Now, if in reading these lines we present mere facts, the effect is tame. Every fact must be given, but it must become an event in a series. The spirit of the time and place must rise in our mind as a background. The imagination must penetrate to the heart of the girl, and realize her resolution, her patriotism, her heroism. The reader must perceive her deliberation and her decision; in short, he must re-create all the workings of her mind: the events described are but a means of manifesting her mind and heart. Expression is concerned primarily with the human soul. A fact in itself is dead; it must be assimilated; it must be seen; it must become food for the imagination, before it becomes a living truth. Thus, imagination in conceiving the smallest event makes it a part of a complete whole: the whole poem, the whole history, the whole situation is held and sustained by the mind, as each idea unfolds itself. The mental conception of the age gives atmosphere and character to the expression of the individual event. The study of a specific object, or even of a scene in its isolation, is called by the artist a sketch or study. A picture is the bringing of all the facts or objects into one degree of light, one color, one tone, one complete whole. Unity is the fundamental law of all art, and it is not a human invention, it is the expression of the relation of things in Nature. The situation, or background, must be intuitively and instinctively conceived; it cannot be reasoned out, it cannot be produced by mechanical adjustment. This process is called composition, and is not imagination. The proper apprehension of situation must come from dramatic instinct, from imaginative intuition. One of the most common violations of this function of the imagination is found in the public reading of the Scriptures. Much of the Bible is poetry, and belongs to the realm of the sublimest art; but passages are often rendered with an entire disregard of any imaginative situation. Objection is even made to studies which endeavor to give the sublime, poetic passages in the Prophets or the Psalms any specific background; and often many passages of the highest exaltation are given in a vague, sad, mournful, or didactic manner, with no situation of any kind. To read appreciatively the poetry of the Prophets or of the Psalms, there must be study to find the historical situation. The imagination must create an environment. What was the occasion? What was in the mind of the poet? In many cases, of course, it will be impossible to find the historic situation; but the attempt to do so brings a deeper comprehension of the poem: the mind will seize upon some conception which will approximate to the right one, so as to give specific feeling to the passage. Even a wrong situation is better than none. Dr. Cheyne, than whom there is no better authority, says: "The historical occasions of the Psalms are not to be determined by a dictatorial assertion;" and in speaking of two views of Psalm L. he says: "Neither view do I myself hold; but I would rather that my readers adopted one or the other than that they rejected all attempts to find historical situations for the sacred lyrics. Without reconstructing the porticoes, we shall not be in a position to do full justice to the inner glories of the palaces of the Psalter." The conception of a situation by a critic colors even his translation of specific words. For example, Ewald thinks that verses 7 and 8 of Psalm CIV. refer to the great earthquake which took place near the close of Uzziah's reign, a calamity which made a deep impression on the national mind, as shown by the imagery of many prophets and psalmists; he therefore translates the passage thus: Ar thy rebuke the mountains flee; At the voice of thy thunder they tremble away; To the place which thou hast founded for them. Most critics, however, think there is a reference here to creation, and so they give a different tense to the verbs; but the ordinary translation means little or nothing. It is foreign to the spirit of Hebrew poetry not to refer to definite places and events. In fact, it is untrue to the spirit of all poetry. The highest flights of the imagination, in dealing with a general truth, start from specific thought and a definite situation. In speaking of the words of Jeremiah, "Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my people and go from them!" Dr. Cheyne says that "one of |