A great and good use of imagination is to reproduce to us our past lives. It is something more than memory. Memory says I was at such a place on a certain day, but imagination brings up the place—the Highland loch, it may be, in the glory of an autumn morning, the purple heather on the hills, the steamer at the pier, the hotel overlooking the steamer, the young man in the coffee-room smiling to the landlord’s daughter, the taste of the fresh salmon, the very smell of the burned oat-cake.
“All that is past,” says Bacon, “is as a dream,” and by imagination we can dream it all over again. And the recollection is sometimes better than the reality, just as in moonlight our village looks more lovely than in sunshine. Sentiment whispers then in our ear, and a halo is thrown over the unsightly and disagreeable.
An additional charm too is that many a problem which may have puzzled us when things actually happened, is solved before we begin to look back. The relationship of people, lovers and lasses, friends and foes, sharpers and simpletons, has been made plain; the foolish have got their deserts and the wise have got theirs; the envious have grown lean and the good-natured and kindly have become fat; the wasters have fallen to poverty and the industrious have risen to fortune.
Such changes as these give value and interest to our recollections when we wake the ghosts of the past and make them parade before us. We are able in a way which was impossible before to be actors, spectators, and enlightened critics—all three rolled in one.
Girls who have now but little short lives, with comparatively few incidents to recall, can hardly realise what a gratification this wandering over the enchanted ground of imagination imparts to mature years. If they did they would often be saying to themselves, How will this look in recollection? And such a thought would keep them from many a frivolity and many an error. But, short lives or long lives, let us go over our past often if for no other reason than that we may understand ourselves, not to speak of our gaining such knowledge as will enable us to steer a safe course through the perils of the future.
Speaking of the future reminds us that that is a great territory of the imaginative. By imagination girls are witches to foretell what is to happen the day after to-morrow.
Now we spend our time ill if we build castles in the air and trust to them as if they were substantial edifices. But, for all that, to let the imagination dwell on what is yet to come has its uses and may be a valuable help to conduct.
Castles in the air and dreams, too hopelessly extravagant ever to be realised have brightened many dull and monotonous lives, and for that reason alone, within bounds, are to be encouraged. Besides this there is an important gain resulting from our projecting the imagination into the future—we are thereby prepared for many events which now find us quite unprepared.
The grasshoppers were wanting in imagination who danced and sang all summer-time. They should have pictured to themselves the snow on the ground, the pools frozen over, and the wind whistling through the bare branches.
A well-to-do man once said to us, “I have all my life had a vision of a workhouse door open to receive me if I did not plod on, rising early and working hard. It is that which has made me saving and prosperous.”