The word itself means an _imaging_ or a making of likenesses. The
imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought--not necessarily
uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or
in any mode upon which the senses can lay hold. It is, therefore, that
faculty in man which is likest to the prime operation of the power of
God, and has, therefore, been called the _creative_ faculty, and its
exercise _creation_. _Poet_ means _maker_. We must not forget, however,
that between creator and poet lies the one unpassable gulf which
distinguishes--far be it from us to say _divides_--all that is God's
from all that is man's; a gulf teeming with infinite revelations, but a
gulf over which no man can pass to find out God, although God needs not
to pass over it to find man; the gulf between that which calls, and that
which is thus called into being; between that which makes in its own
image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the
word _creation_ for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination
of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring
is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his
maker.
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