Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/308

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many things. It is a sense of beauty and harmony; it is an instinct of poetry and prophecy. A Persian poet describes it as an immortal sense of memory which is always striving to recall the beautiful things the soul has lost. Another fancy, also from the East, is that it is 'an instructive premonition of beautiful things to come.' Another, which is perhaps the most accurate description of all, is that it is 'the sundial of the soul, on which God flashes the true time of day.' This is true, if we bear in mind that Imagination is always ahead of science, pointing out in advance the great discovery to come. Shakespeare foretold the whole science of geology in three words—'sermons in stones'; and the whole business of the electric telegram in one line—'I'll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.' One of the Hebrew prophets 'imagined' the phonograph when he wrote, 'Declare unto me the image of a voice.' As we all know, the marks on the wax cylinder in a phonograph are 'the image of a voice.' The airship may prove a very marvelous invention, but the imagination which saw Aladdin's palace flying from one country to another was long before it. All the genii in the 'Arabian Nights' stories were only the symbols of the elements which man might control if he but rubbed the lamp of his intelligence smartly enough. Every fairy-tale has a meaning; every legend a lesson. The submarine boat in perfection has been 'imagined' by Jules Verne. Wireless telegraphy appears to have been known in the very remote days of Egypt, for in a very old book called 'The History of the Pyramids,' translated from the Arabic, and published in France in 1672, we find an account of a certain high priest of Memphis, named Saurid, who, so says the ancient Arabian chronicler, 'prepared for himself a casket, wherein he put magic fire, and, shutting himself up with the casket, he sent messages with