white plumes, and a turned-up rim, that this combination will look well together.
Suppose you have never been able to see how you would look in this particular
hat with your hair done in this or that way. If you are in this helpless state shall
you not have to depend finally on the taste of the milliner, or accept the "model,"
and so fail to reveal any taste or individuality on your own part?
How many times have you been disappointed in some article of dress, because
when you planned it you were unable to see it all at once so as to get the full
effect; or else you could not see yourself in it, and so be able to judge whether it
suited you! How many homes have in them draperies and rugs and wall paper
and furniture which are in constant quarrel because someone could not see
before they were assembled that they were never intended to keep company!
How many people who plan their own houses, would build them just the same
again after seeing them completed? The man who can see a building complete
before a brick has been laid or a timber put in place, who can see it not only in
its details one by one as he runs them over in his mind, but can see the building
in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the structure. And this is the
man who is drawing a large salary as an architect, for imaginations of this kind
are in demand. Only the one who can see in his "mind's eye," before it is begun,
the thing he would create, is capable to plan its construction. And who will say
that ability to work with images of these kinds is not of just as high a type as that
which results in the construction of plots upon which stories are built!
The Building of Ideals and Plans.—Nor is the part of imagination less marked
in the formation of our life's ideals and plans. Everyone who is not living blindly
and aimlessly must have some ideal, some pattern, by which to square his life
and guide his actions. At some time in our life I am sure that each of us has
selected the person who filled most nearly our notion of what we should like to
become, and measured ourselves by this pattern. But there comes a time when
we must idealize even the most perfect individual; when we invest the character
with attributes which we have selected from some other person, and thus
worship at a shrine which is partly real and partly ideal.
As time goes on, we drop out more and more of the strictly individual element,
adding correspondingly more of the ideal, until our pattern is largely a
construction of our own imagination, having in it the best we have been able to
glean from the many characters we have known. How large a part these ever-
changing ideals play in our lives we shall never know, but certainly the part is
not an insignificant one. And happy the youth who is able to look into the future
and see himself approximating some worthy ideal. He has caught a vision which