A similar vision might work a change on some people we know. Bring your own self forward, Louisa, in the glittering hall of that imagination of yours, picturing yourself as old and disinclined for work, and see if ever after you will not be industrious, wise, and prudent.
“For age and want save while you may,
No morning sun lasts a whole day.”
A little more imagination may often be recommended to the good looking, not forgetting all who think themselves so. Perhaps we should rather say a little more of the right sort, for they indulge in flights of fancy enough when it is a matter of picturing those brought into captivity by their charms. They should leave considering their conquests and captives and make an effort to realise what they themselves will be, say, at fifty or sixty, if they live so long. The beauty and attractiveness of youth will then be over, and unless they have something else to recommend them, their place will be on one of the back seats of human life.
This should set them furnishing the inside of their heads as richly as Nature has done the outside. Beauty vanishes, but mental culture endures and is found attractive, and even charming, to the very end of the chapter. There are few sadder sights than that of a beauty in ruins with an untrained intellect and none more refreshing than that of a bright old wrinkled face, with a mind behind it stored with information and animated by shrewdness and good nature.
There is danger in all things, for all—yes, even the best—may be misused. Imagination is a friendly help to elevate, direct, and brighten our lives as we have seen, but that does not happen with the foolish. Instead of occupying this wondrous faculty with what is profitable and beautiful, they devote it to what is degrading and mean, and thus become a great deal worse with imagination than they would be without it.
And, even where its subjects are not positively objectionable, imagination sometimes wastes its energy on whimsicalities and runs riot in the broad fields of extravagance and nonsense. Of such a nature was the fertile fancy of an old friend of ours who, to the end of her days, showed great reverence for dogs and cats because she believed them animated by the souls of her ancestors.
A very silly use of imagination is to picture to ourselves suspicions, dangers and misfortunes. Some of us have a great deal of ability in this line, and endure torments daily over evils that never arrive.
“Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you” is a safe rule, and only a stupid girl will set her imagination working so as to make herself miserable. Caroline, we fear, is of the stupid class—no doubt, Caroline, it is on this occasion only—or she would at once get rid of the dreadful thought she imparted to us last Tuesday that the letters sent to her by her sweetheart were detained at the post office and read. As if the postmistress, even in her country place, had not something better to do!
Another danger of the imagination is that we are apt to take refuge in it against the duties of real life. In real life there is friction, and there is nothing of that in dreamland. We can make that pleasant country to suit ourselves, without irritation, without contradiction, without mishaps, everything coming just right. Our business, however, in the world is not to dream but to act, for which reason this great gift of imagination must be kept in its proper place. It is a good servant, but, by foolish indulgence, may become a very bad master.
But, after making all allowances for dangers—those we have named and others that might be stated—the fact remains that to the greater number of us a little more imagination would not come amiss. It would make our lives richer, and happier, more useful, more kindly, more sensible. It is only a “little more” that is wanted. That any of us are entirely destitute of it is improbable. To be “dry sticks” is not common for girls.