There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

The saying contrasts two modes of apprehending reality: the quantifiable, external world grasped through measurement and rational method (“line and rule”), and the inward, qualitative world accessed through emotion, intuition, and creative vision (“hearts and imagination”). Read in the orbit of Romantic-era aesthetics with which Hunt is often associated, it elevates subjective experience as a necessary complement to empirical knowledge. The implication is not that measurement is false, but that it is incomplete: human meaning, beauty, and moral insight arise from faculties that cannot be reduced to numbers or geometry. The quote thus frames a perennial tension between scientific description and imaginative understanding, urging a fuller account of what it means to know.