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Nor know Thee till I die.

Yet may I look with heart unshook

On blow brought home or missed—

Yet may I hear with equal ear

The clarions down the List;

Yet set my lance above mischance

And ride the barrière—

Oh, hit or miss, how little ’tis,

My Lady is not there!

Rudyard Kipling.

All attempts to define poetic imagination, to determine its scope or prescribe its limits, leave us cold and unsatisfied, for the simple reason that its variety and range are unlimited. The aesthetic, moral and spiritual faculties are all in essence identical, so that no definition of the aesthetic can exclude the spiritual, and art and poetry spring from the same root as religion. They all have what Wordsworth calls the “Spirit of Paradise.”[14] Imagination[15] in its larger sense includes all those higher faculties of man, all that lifts him above his material existence. The “True Romance” in this fine poem is imagination in this complete sense. By our lower perceptive faculties we see the world of Nature in its material form; by our higher powers we apprehend its aesthetic, moral and spiritual beauty. (Man with his consciousness, will, reason, and also his higher imaginative faculties, is as much part of Nature as any star or clod, crystal or gas, fly or flower.) Hence imagination gives us the vision of glory in earth and sky, the sense of wonder and worship, the emotions of sympathy and love; it teaches us duty and self sacrifice; it awakens in us a sense of the mystery of birth, life and death, directing our thoughts from the finite and material world to the infinite realm of the spiritual.