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Such are the figures of women, horses, basket of summer fruit, and so on, in the visions of Zechariah and Amos. The third stage is when the reason gets the better of the imagination and there are no forms or images, but real essences and ideas, like the visions of Ezekiel, which represent real things in the secrets of nature and divinity.

He started to find it was merely Mary Ann. But she was no longer merely Mary Ann, he remembered with another shock. She loomed large to him in the match-light he seemed to see her through a golden haze. Tumultuous images of her glorified gilded future rose and mingled dizzily in his brain. And yet, was he dreaming?

Who can resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of Before the Mirror, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler's Little White Girl? One hesitates to quote again lines so well known. But it is as good an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities of Swinburne's music, apart from his phrases and images:

Memory plays funny tricks in such a fight, where things happen quickly, and all kinds of mental images succeed one another in a detached kind of way, while the work goes on. As I gave the order in question there slipped through my mind Mahan's account of Nelson's orders that each ship as it sailed forward, if it saw another ship engaged with an enemy's ship, should rake the latter as it passed.

The ideal law of the recurrence of images is that known since Hamilton's time under the name of "law of redintegration," which consists in the passing from a part to the whole, each element tending to reproduce the complete state, each member of a series the whole of that series.

We speak simply of the intrinsic value of the form of the whale, of its lines, its movement, its proportion. This is a more or less individual set of images which are revived in the act of recognition; this revival constitutes the recognition, and the beauty of the form is the pleasure of that revival.

Bodily sensations can be brought into a correlation by physiology, and thus take their place ultimately among sources of knowledge of the physical world. But images cannot be made to fit in with the simultaneous sensations and images of others.

There can be no question, I said, that the truth would be to them just nothing but the shadows of the images. That is certain. And now look again, and see how they are released and cured of their folly.

He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by parsing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another.

The magic of Hilda was rather akin to the old Cimbrian Alirones, or sacred prophetesses; and, as with them, it demanded the priestess that is, the person without human ties or emotions, a spirit clear as a mirror, upon which the great images of destiny might be cast untroubled.