On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

ON
POETIC INTERPRETATION
OF NATURE

BY
J. C. SHAIRP, LL. D.
PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE OF ST. SALVATOR AND ST. LEONARD,
ST. ANDREWS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1900

PREFACE.

This small book is the result of some lectures which I had occasion to give to a large popular audience more than a year ago. I have since re-written and re-cast them into their present shape. Yet the book still bears the impress of the peculiar object with which the lectures were composed, and of the circumstances under which they were delivered. That object was to add a kind of literary supplement to several longer and more systematic courses of lectures on physical subjects, such as Chemistry, Geology, and Physiology, which were delivered at the same time by Professors who are my colleagues in this College. It seemed to me that some good might be done, if I could succeed in bringing before our hearers the truth that, while the several physical sciences explain each some portion of Nature’s mysteries, or Nature considered under one special aspect, yet that after all the physical sciences have said their say, and given their explanations, there remains more behind—another aspect of Nature—a further truth regarding it, with which, real and interesting though it is, Science does not intermeddle. The truth on which especially I wished to fix attention is the relation which exists between Nature and the sensitive and imaginative soul of man, and the result or creation which arises from the meeting of these two. That is a true and genuine result, which it does not fall within the province of Science to investigate, but which it is one peculiar function of Poetry to seize, and, as far as may be, to interpret. That the beauty which looks from the whole face of Nature, and is interwoven with every fibre of it, is not the less, because it requires a living soul for its existence, as real a truth as the gravitation of the earth’s particles or the composition of its materials,—that careful noting and familiar knowledge of this beauty reveals a new aspect of the world, which will amply repay the observer,—and that the Poets are, in a special way, kindlers of sensibility, teachers who make us observe more carefully, and feel more keenly the wonders that are around us: these are some of the truths which I wished to bring before my hearers, and which, if I could in any measure succeed in doing so, would, I felt sure, not be without mental benefit.

As the audience whom I addressed consisted mainly of young persons whose chief employments lay elsewhere than in libraries, I felt that I had no right to reckon on any wide acquaintance with English literature. This will account for the occurrence in the later chapters of many well-known passages of English Poetry, which to persons at all conversant with letters may seem too familiar even for quotation. If, however, the passages quoted served to illustrate the views I wished to impress, I was not desirous to travel beyond well-worn paths.

In treating of a subject which has in recent years engaged the thoughts of many distinguished men, it could not but be that I should often come across and use the thoughts of others. No doubt it is not easy always to discriminate between thoughts that have risen spontaneously to one’s own mind, and those which have been suggested by other writers. Whenever I have been aware that I was using thoughts not my own, I have tried to make due acknowledgment of this in the text. At the same time I would wish to acknowledge here more expressly how much I am conscious of obligation to three living writers,—to Canon Mozley of Oxford, for suggestions received from his sermon on “Nature,” and incorporated in my chapter on “the mystical side of Nature;” to Mr. Stopford Brooke for suggestive generalizations contained in his “Theology in the English Poets;” and to Mr. Leslie Stephen for some true and new thoughts in his recent Essay on Wordsworth’s Ethics; some thoughts derived from the two latter writers I have tried to interweave into the last chapter of my book.

As to the book itself, I am well aware how small a portion of how vast a subject it has even attempted to deal with. But, as the original lectures were written, so this book is meant, mainly for the young. If, however, it should induce any of these to look on the outward world with more heedful and thoughtful eyes, and to win thence for themselves finer observations, and deeper delight, it will have served a good end.

St Salvator’s College, St. Andrews, June 12, 1877.

CONTENTS.

	PAGE
CHAPTER I.
The Sources of Poetry	[11]
CHAPTER II.
The Poetic Feeling awakened by the World of Nature	[ 32]
CHAPTER III.
Poetic and Scientific Wonder	[ 46]
CHAPTER IV.
Will Science put out Poetry?	[57]
CHAPTER V.
How far Science may Modify Poetry	[64]
CHAPTER VI.
The Mystical Side of Nature	[77]
CHAPTER VII.
Primeval Imagination working on Nature—Language and Mythology	[87]
CHAPTER VIII.
Some of the Ways in which Poets deal with Nature	[102]
CHAPTER IX.
Nature in Hebrew Poetry, and in Homer	[136]
CHAPTER X.
Nature in Lucretius and Virgil	[153]
CHAPTER XI.
Nature in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton	[170]
CHAPTER XII.
Return to Nature begun by Allan Ramsay and Thomson	[193]
CHAPTER XIII.
Nature in Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Burns	[205]
CHAPTER XIV.
Wordsworth as an Interpreter of Nature	[235]

THE
POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.

CHAPTER I.
THE SOURCES OF POETRY.

Poetry, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals, two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric—Man and Nature. Yet such a statement seems hardly adequate. For is there not in all high Poetry, whether it deals with Nature or with Man, continual reference, now latent, now expressed, to something which is beyond and above both? This reference has taken many shapes, and uttered itself in many ways, according to the belief and civilization of each age and country. But by whatever mists and obstructions it has been colored and refracted, it has never been wholly absent from true Poetry, and has been working itself clearer, and making itself more powerfully felt, as the world grows older. The Higher Life encompassing the life both of Man and of Nature; the deeper Foundation on which both ultimately repose; the omnipresent Power which binds both together, and makes them work in unison toward some further end,—this has been a truth ever present in the highest Poetry, to which great Poets have always witnessed. Therefore, even in the most summary view of the domain of Poetry, we must not omit this invisible but most powerful element. To express it clearly, we must say that Poetry has three objects, which in varying degrees enter into it,—Man, Nature, and God. The presence of this last pervades all great Poetry, whether it lifts an eye of reverence directly towards Himself, or whether the presence be only indirectly felt, as the centre to which all deep thoughts about Man and Nature ultimately tend. Regarded in this view, the field over which Poetry ranges becomes coextensive with the domain of Philosophy, and indeed of Theology. Dissimilar, often opposed, as is the procedure of Poetry, of Philosophy, and of Theology, different as are the faculties which each calls into play, and the mode in which these faculties deal with their objects, yet the hinges on which all alike turn, the cardinal conceptions on which their eye is fixed, are fundamentally the same. While Philosophy and Theology, in their striving to attain distinct conceptions, are forced to deal with these great ideas separately, and to keep them systematically apart, Poetry, on the other hand, under the fusing and blending power of imagination, is, in its highest mood, pervaded by a continual reference to all the three at once, and will at times combine and flash them all at once upon the soul in one inspired line.

It is, however, of only one of these three main objects of Poetry that I now propose to treat—the action of Poetry on external Nature, the way in which the poets deal with the outward world. In doing this it will appear at a glance, and will become more clear in the sequel, that it is impossible to isolate this one aspect of Poetry; that, even when the poet’s regards are mainly turned toward the outward world, the sense of God and of man is not far away. But even when we do our best to limit the subject as far as may be, it is so vast in itself and in its ramifications, that, far from hoping to exhaust it in these few pages, I shall be well content if, when they are finished, it is found that a few avenues of thought have been opened up, a few glimpses obtained into truths which are real and suggestive.

Before going farther, let me say what I mean by Nature, for there is no word which more needs definition. There is none, except perhaps its counterpart, Reason, which is used in more various, often conflicting, meanings, or with more shades of meaning, each passing into the other. By Nature, then, I understand the whole sum of appearances which reach us, which are made known to us, primarily through the senses. It includes all the intimations we have through sense of that great entity which lies outside of ourselves, but with which we have so much to do. For my present purpose I do not include Man, either his body or his mind, as part of Nature, but regard him rather as standing out from Nature, and surveying and using that great external entity which encompasses and confronts him at every turn, he being the contemplator, Nature the thing contemplated.

The same external Nature which Poetry works on supplies the staple or raw material with which all the Physical Sciences deal, and which they endeavor to reduce to exact knowledge, subduing apparent confusion and multiplicity into unity, law, and order. Each of the Physical Sciences attempts to explain the outward world in one of its aspects, to interpret it from one point of view. And the whole circle of the Physical Sciences, or Physical Science in its widest extent, confines itself to explaining the appearances of the material world by the properties of matter, and to reducing what is complex and manifold to the operation of a few simple but all-pervading laws. But besides those aspects of Nature which Physical Science explains, over and above those laws which the Sciences discover, there are other sides or aspects of Nature which come to us through other than scientific avenues, and which, when they do reach us, bring home to us new truth, and raise us to noble contemplations. This ordered array of material appearances, these marshaled lines of Nature’s sequences, wonderful and beautiful though they be, are not in themselves all. No reasonable being can rest in them. Inevitably he is carried out of and beyond these, to other inquiries which no Physics can answer: How stand these phenomena to the thinking mind and feeling heart which contemplates them? how came they to be as they are? are they there of themselves, or is there a Higher Centre from which they proceed? what is their origin? what the goal toward which they travel? Inquiries such as these, which are the genuine product of Reason, lead us for their answer, not to the Physics of the Universe, but to another order of thought, to Poetry, to Philosophy, and to Theology. And the light thrown from these regions on this marvelous outward framework, while it contradicts nothing in the body of truth which Science has made good, permeates the whole with a higher meaning, and transfigures it with a splendor which is Divine.

Philosophy and Theology we must for the present leave alone, and ask only what is that aspect of Nature, that truth of the External World, with which Poetry has more immediately to do. To put it in the simplest way: it is Beauty, that strange and wonderful entity with which all creation is clothed as with a garment, or rather I should say pervaded and penetrated as by a subtle essence, inwrought into its inmost fibre. The Poet is the man to whom is given the eye that sees this more instinctively, the heart that feels it more intensely, than other men do; and who has the power to express it and bring it home to his fellow-men. But if I were to confine myself to this I should not be saying much. For the question would at once be asked, “Pray, what is Beauty?” And it might be further asked, “Is it not as much the business of the Painter as of the Poet to seize and express the visible beauty of which you speak?”

Any attempt to answer the first question, and to explain what is Beauty, would involve a long discussion, perhaps not a very profitable one. At any rate it would lead me far from my present purpose. This only may be said in passing. Light, as physicists inform us, is not something which exists in itself apart from any sentient being. The external reality is not light, but the motion of certain particles, which, when they impinge on the eye, and have been conveyed along the visual nerve to the brain, are felt by the mind as light,—result in the perception of light. Light, therefore, is not a purely objective thing, but is something produced by the meeting of certain outward motions with a perceiving mind. Again, certain vibrations of the air striking on the drum of the ear, and communicated by the nerve of hearing to the brain, result in the perception of sound. Sound, therefore, is not a purely objective entity, but is a result that requires to its production the meeting of an outward vibration with a hearing mind; it is the result of the joint action of these two elements. In a similar way, certain qualities of outward objects, certain combinations of laws in the material world, when apprehended by the soul through its æsthetic and imaginative faculties, result in the perception of what we call Beauty. Therefore Beauty, neither wholly without us nor wholly within us, is a product resulting from the meeting of certain qualities of the outward world with a sensitive and imaginative soul. The combination of both of these elements is requisite to its existence. It is no merely mental or subjective thing, born of association, and depending on individual caprice, as the Scotch philosophers so long fancied. When the two elements necessary to the perception of it have met, it is a reality as inevitable and as veritable as the law of gravitation, or any law which science registers. And when, either through our own perception, or through the teaching of the poets, we learn to apprehend it—when it has found entrance into us, through eye and ear, imagination and emotion, we have learnt something more about the world in which we dwell than Physics have taught us,—a new truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination, not through the scientific or logical faculty.

If, then, Beauty be a real quality interwoven into the essential texture of Creation, and if Poetry be the fittest human expression of the existence of this quality, it follows that Poetry has to do with truth as really as Science has, though with a different order of truth. This is perhaps not the common view of the matter. An old Scotch gentleman I once knew, one of the most sagacious and wise of his generation, who, whenever anything was propounded which was more than usually extravagant and absurd, used to dismiss it with a wave of his hand, saying: “Oh, that is Poetry.” Yet he was one who could see in the outlines of his native hills, and feel in all human relations, whatever was most beautiful. There are, I dare say, a good many sensible people who share my friend’s view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful, fantastic, unreal—only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. It is because I have a quite opposite conviction, because I believe Poetry to have a true and noble place in this order of things, a place not made by the conceit of man, but intended by the Maker of this order, because I hold Poetry to be, what Wordsworth has called it, “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”—to be “immortal as the heart of man,” it is because of these convictions that there is claimed for it the serious regard of reasonable men, and that it seems worth our while to dwell for a little on one, though only one, aspect of this many-sided study.

The real nature and intrinsic truth of Poetry will be made more apparent, if we may turn aside for a moment to reflect on the essence of that state of mind which we call the poetic, the genesis of that creation which we call Poetry. Whenever any object of sense, or spectacle of the outer world, any truth of reason, or event of past history, any fact of human experience, any moral or spiritual reality; whenever, in short, any fact or object which the sense, or the intellect, or the soul, or the spirit of man can apprehend, comes home to one so as to touch him to the quick, to pierce him with a more than usual vividness and sense of reality, then is awakened that stirring of the imagination, that glow of emotion, in which Poetry is born. There is no truth cognizable by man which may not shape itself into Poetry. It matters not whether it be a vision of Nature’s ongoings, or a conception of the understanding, or some human incident, or some truth of the affections, or some moral sentiment, or some glimpse into the spiritual world; any one of these may be so realized as to become fit subjects for poetic utterance. Only in order that it should be so, it is necessary that the object, whatever it is, should cease to be a merely sensible object, or a mere notion of the understanding, and pass inward,—pass out of the coldness of the merely notional region into the warm atmosphere of the life-giving Imagination. Vitalized there, the truth shapes itself into living images which kindle the passion and affections, and stimulate the whole man. This is what has been called the real apprehension of truths, as opposed to the merely notional assent to them. There is no quality in which men more differ than in this intensity of mental nature, this power of vividly realizing whatever a man does lay hold of. It is an essential—indeed a primary—ingredient in the composition of the Poet; but is not confined to him. It is shared by all men who are powerful in any line of thought or action. This mental energy, this intensity of realizing power, is the stuff out of which are made all who in any way really move their fellow-men. It creates, as has been well said, “Heroes and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers, and reformers, the pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, and adventurers.” In these and such like, the men of abounding energy, who have revolutionized states and moved the world, the process had begun with the vivid realization of some truth through the imagination; but it has not stopped there. It has gone on from the imagination to the affections. It has stirred the hopes, the fears, the loves, the hates of the soul, enkindling them and driving them with full force on the will, and propelling the man into action. In the Poet, on the other hand, the process not only begins, but continues in the imagination, kindling, no doubt, a real glow of emotion, but not leading him, as poet, to any outward action, save the one action of giving vent to what he feels, of finding poetic expression for the vision with which his imagination is filled.

In this we see the distinction between the Poet and those other men of intense soul, who share with him the power of vivid apprehension, of making real through the imagination whatever truths they see at all. They carry that truth which they have imaginatively apprehended into the region of the passions and the will, and rest not till they have condensed it into outward action. He keeps the truths which he sees within the confines of imagination, and is impelled by his peculiar nature to seek a vehicle for it, not in action but in song, or in some other form of artistic expression. And hence the practical danger which besets the Poet, and indeed all æsthetic and literary men, of becoming unreal, if that truth which they see and cultivate for artistic purposes they never try to embody in any form of practical action, any common purpose with their fellow-men.

If then it be asked what are the proper objects of Poetry, what is the proper field for the exercise of the Poet’s art, the answer, supposing what I have said to be true, is, the whole range of existence; wherever the sensations, thoughts, feelings of man can travel, there the Poet may be at his side, and find material for his faculties to work on. The one condition of his working is, that the object pass out of the region of mere dry fact, or abstract notion, into the warm and breathing realm of imagination. What the mental process is by which objects cease to be mere dead facts, informations, and become imaged into living realities, I stay not to inquire. The whole philosophy of Imagination is a subject on which the metaphysicians have as yet said little that is helpful.

With regard to the working of Imagination and other so-called faculties, Philosophers, I rather think, have cut and carved our mental nature with too keen a knife. They have “murdered to dissect.” Our books lay it down, for instance, as an axiom, that a definite act of the pure understanding must needs precede every movement of the affections, that we must form a distinct conception of a thing as pleasant before we can desire it, that we must first judge a character to be noble, before admiration of it can be awakened. I am not sure that this is the true account of the matter, am not convinced that the understanding unmixed with feeling, the pure intelligence untouched by sentiment, must first decide before the affections can be moved. Is it so clear that in all cases we can separate knowledge from affection? Is there not a large field of truth—namely, moral truths, in which we cannot do so—into which the affections must actively enter before any judgment can be formed? For, as has been said,[1] “The affections themselves are a kind of understanding; we cannot understand without them. Affection is a part of insight; it is required to understand the facts of the case. The moral affections, e. g., are the very instruments by which we intellectually apprehend good and high human character. All admiration is affection—the admiration of virtue, the admiration of nature. Affection itself then is a kind of intelligence, and we cannot separate the feeling in our nature from the reason. Feeling is necessary for comprehension, and we cannot know what embrace particular instance of goodness is, we cannot embrace the true conception of goodness in general, without it.”

If this be true of moral apprehension, if in this intelligence and affection are so coincident, so interpenetrate each other, that we cannot say which is first, which last, where the one ends, the other begins, the same truth holds good in imaginative apprehension. Here, too, there is not first a cut-and-dry intellectual act, and then a succeeding emotion. From the first, in every act of the imagination, these two elements are present simultaneously; though it is true that in time the emotional element tends to grow stronger than the intellectual, sometimes even overpowers it. Imagination in its essence seems to be, from the first, intellect and feeling blended and interpenetrating each other. Thus it would seem that purely intellectual acts belong to the surface and outside of our nature,—as you pass onward to the depths, the more vital places of the soul, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moral elements are all equally at work,—and this in virtue of their greater reality, their more essential truth, their nearer contact with the centre of things. To this region belong all acts of high imagination—the region intermediate between pure understanding and moral affection, partaking of both elements, looking equally both ways.

But it is not with the philosophy of the process, but with the results that we have now to do. All men possess this power of vitalizing knowledge in some measure. The mental qualities which go to make the Poet have nothing exclusive or exceptional in them. They differ nothing in kind from those of other men—only in degree. As one well entitled to speak for the Poets has told us,—the Poet, the man of vivid soul shares the same interests, sympathies, feelings as other men, only he has them more intensely. “He is distinguished from other men, not by any peculiar gifts, but by greater promptness and intensity in thinking and feeling those things which other men think and feel, and by a greater power of expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him.”[2]

I have said that the range of Poetry is boundless as the universe. Whenever the soul comes into living contact with fact and truth, whenever it realizes these with more than common vividness, there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of emotion. And the expression of that thrill, that glow, is Poetry. The range of poetic emotion may thus be as wide as the range of human thought, as existence. It does not follow from this that all objects are alike fit to awaken poetry. The nobler the objects the nobler will be the poetry they awaken, when they fall on the heart of a true poet. But though this be so, yet poetry may be found springing up in the most unlikely places, among what seem the driest efforts of human thought, just as you may see the intense blue of the Alpine forget-me-not[3] lighting up the darkest crevices, or the most bare and inaccessible ledges of the mountain precipice.

In illustration of this, let me give an anecdote which I lately read in one of Canon Liddon’s sermons in St. Paul’s:—“Why do you sit up so late at night?” was a question put to an eminent mathematician. “To enjoy myself,” was the reply. “But how can that be? I thought you spent your time in working out problems.” “So I do, and that is my enjoyment,” answered the mathematician. “Depend upon it,” he added, “those lose a form of enjoyment too keen and sweet to be described, who do not know, after long effort, what is the joy of recognizing the agreement between two mathematical formulæ.” If, in such moments of profound satisfaction, our mathematician had added to his other powers the power adequately to utter the joy of his “eureka,” the expression of it would, no doubt, have been a high poem. “Poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language,”[4] or it is the fine wine that is served at the banquet of human life. And what is true of mathematical is still more true of other forms of truth. Whenever a soul comes into vivid contact with it, there springs up that emotion which is the essence of Poetry. And that this contact is so delightful, that all truth and the human soul are so akin, that when they recognize each other, the immediate result is this thrill of joy, this pure and high emotion, what does not this fact hint of the nature of the soul and its origin?

We now then say that as Physical Science explains the appearances of the material world solely by the properties of matter, and it is its business to do so, so Poetry seizes the relation of outward objects to the soul and expresses this, and it is its business to do so. Physical Science deals with the outward object alone. Poetry has to do with the object plus the soul of man. Or, to put it otherwise: from the meeting and combined action of these two forces, the outward object and the soul, there arises a creation, or emanation, different from either, but partaking of the nature of both. And it is the business of true poetry to express this. Any real object, vividly apprehended, we thus see, will awaken in an intelligent and emotional being a response which is the beginning of poetry. The depth and breadth and volume of that response will, of course, be proportioned to the nobility of the object which evokes it, and to the responsive capacity of the mind to which it makes its appeal. And if it be asked, How are we to estimate the nobility of any object? we may say that its measure will be the variety and strength and elevation of the emotions which it has the power of evoking in those spirits which are most finely touched. The deeper, the larger, the higher the object presented to a soul fitted to receive it, the greater will be the body of emotion with which that soul will respond to it, the finer will be the poetry which is the expression of that emotion.

All delight we know on earth arises, as the wise Bishop Butler has told us, “from a faculty having its proper object,” and the perfection of happiness would consist “in all the faculties having found their full and adequate object.” If then those partial objects, those shadows of perfection, which are the highest objects vouchsafed to us here, awaken in us a keen responsive thrill of emotion, whose fittest utterance is song, what shall it be for a human soul to be admitted to the vision of Him “who alone is an object, an infinitely more than adequate object to our most exalted faculties—an adequate supply to all the capacities of our souls, a subject to the understanding, an object to the affections.” In the contemplation of this truth long pondered, the deep heart of the philosophic Bishop breaks forth into a strain of meditation in which the conflict between intense feeling and his habitual self-restraint seems almost to overpower him. And what a view does this give of the essential permanence of Poetry, how in the essence it must be eternal as the soul of man! It seems to open a glimpse into the meaning of the mysterious imagery of the Apocalypse, and to hint how it will be that the joy of the Redeemed before the Throne can utter itself only in that new song which none can learn but they.

Thus far I have spoken only of the feeling or emotion which generates Poetry. Little or nothing has been said of that other side—the expression of the feeling in words. The mathematician of whom I have spoken was not, for all his joy, a poet. Why? Because though he had the material of poetry within him in the intense joy, he had not the power of putting it forth, of making it audible. He kept all the delight to himself, and could not by utterance impart it to others. He was at best but a dumb poet—a poet “in posse,” not a poet “in esse,” as the Schoolmen speak. And the question arises, Is not a dumb Poet a contradiction in terms? is it not of the very essence of a poet that he should be vocal? Is it not in this, his power of voicing his emotion, rather than in his power of feeling it, that he is distinguished from common men? Here we come on a great controversy on which I shall not venture to dogmatize. Wordsworth, we all remember, held that

“Many are the poets that are sown

By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,

The vision and the faculty divine;

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”

But Goethe and many others with him hold that without the power of poetic expression there can be no poet; that as well might you speak of a child being born which was a mind without a body, as of poetry existing in the soul which does not embody itself in language; that, if we are to divide Poetry into essence and expression, the garment of musical words is indeed the more essential of the two—or rather, that Poetry is non-existent till it has clothed itself in words; that in the true poet the emotion and the expression of it come into being at once, and are one. To this side Coleridge, I believe, would lean, for we find him saying—“The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination, and ... may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned.”

On the whole, then, without deciding whether the essence of the poetic nature lies in the capacity of feeling the emotion, and brooding over the shaping thought, or in the power of projecting it in words, this may be said:—Even if the potential poet may be silent, the actual poet must add the power of embodying his emotion in melodious words. And this from no conventional artifice of literature; but because, before the existence of any literature, the natural expression of strong emotion is a chant, a song. There is an essential kinship between the waves of excited feeling within the breast, the heaving of the soul under the power of emotion, and a corresponding rhythmical cadence in the words which utter it. Song or chant and emotion are as intrinsically allied as word and thought. The poet is the man whose emotions, intenser than those of other men, naturally find a vent for themselves in some form of harmonious words, whether this be the form of metre or of balanced and musical prose. The rhythmical vibrations of his soul long to project themselves into some sonorous medium. And for poetry to lie as it does dead in our printed books, to be read merely by the eye, or, if uttered aloud, to be read as one would a newspaper, is as unnatural, as emptying to it of its meaning, as it is for the lovely wild-flower to be seen dried and colorless within the leaves of a herbarium. Not of lyrical poetry only, though of it preëminently, but of all high poetry, may it be said, that it is only then fitly uttered when it is chanted, not read, and so it is with a chant that most poets have recited their own poetry. As Wordsworth tells us, “Though the accompaniment of a musical instrument be dispensed with, the true poet does not therefore abandon his privilege distinct from that of the mere proseman;

“He murmurs near the running brooks,

A music sweeter than their own.”

It is a sad divorce that has long been made between poetry and song. We shall never know the full power of Poetry till she has wandered back to her original home, and found there her long-severed sister, Music. Only then, if they could find each other again, and come forth to the world in blended might, should we know the full compass of that marvelous creation which we call Poetry.

CHAPTER II.
THE POETIC FEELING AWAKENED BY THE WORLD OF NATURE.

If the view taken in the former chapter of the genesis of Poetry be true, if any existence keenly realized may awaken it, must not that material framework which encompasses us from the cradle to the grave enter most intimately into our earliest and most permanent feelings, and color all the poetry which expresses them? For are not the visible earth and skies the storehouse from which imagination furnishes herself with her earliest forms, and draws her broadest as well as most delicate resemblances? Are these not the substance round which the affections twine many of their first and finest tendrils? Next to the household faces, is not the visible world the earliest existence that we know, the last we lose sight of in our earthly sojourn? All his life long man is encompassed with it, and never gets beyond its reach. He lies an infant in the lap of Nature before he has awakened to any consciousness. When consciousness does awaken within him, the external world is the occasion of the awakening, the first thing he learns to know at the same time that he learns his mother’s look and his own existence. For the growing boy she is the homely nurse that, long before schools and school-masters intermeddle with him, feeds his mind with materials, pouring into him alike the outward framework of his thought and the colors that flush over the chambers of his imagery. The expressive countenance of this earth and of these heavens, glad or pensive, stern or dreary, sublime or homely, is looking in on his heart at every hour and mingling with his dreams. Nature is wooing his spirit in manifold and mysterious ways, to elevate him with her vastness and sublimity, to gladden him with her beauty, to depress him with her bleakness, to restore him with her calm. This quick interchange of feeling between the world without and the world within, this vast range of sympathy, so subtle, so unceasing, so mysterious, is a fact as certain and as real as the flow of the tides or the motion of the earth. Yet, though truth it be, it is one which Science cannot recognize, and which she has left wholly to the poet. It is his to witness to the fact of this intimacy—kinship, I might say—between the movements of Nature and the heart of Man, to represent the relation and interpret it. And though he may never be able fully to compass or exhaust all the import of these relations, or to penetrate to the bottom of the secret, yet it is one chief office of the poet to express it, to get it recognized, to keep alive the sense of among his fellow-men, and to interpret to them, as best he may, those enduring yet tender intimacies that exist between their hearts and the wide world of eye and ear that surrounds him.

This mighty process of influencing man, not only through his corporeal needs, but in the more delicate recesses of the heart, the outward world, it is clear, must have been carrying on unremittingly since the earliest appearance of man on the earth. But what may have been the phases of it in primeval times, before history finds man, is a question I do not propose to enter on. No doubt, even in the most remote eras, when savage men dwelt naked in caves, or cowered in abject worship before the blind forces of Nature, and lived in terror of wild beasts, or of each other, even then there must have been moments when their hearts were imaginatively touched, as either the hurricane or the thunder awed them, or Nature looked on them more benignly through the sunset or the dawn. In that later stage, when the Aryan family had reached their mythologizing era, and owing to the weakness of their abstracting powers and the strength of untutored imagination, were weaving the appearances of earth and sky into their hierarchies of gods, Nature and Imagination were face to face, and were all in all.

The other intellectual powers of man were as yet comparatively dormant. He had not yet learned consciously to disengage the thoughts of himself and of God from the visible appearances in which they were still entangled. But to trace the movements of Imagination through that primeval time forms no part of my present task. Even without attempting this, there is more than enough to detain our thoughts, if we attempt to trace, even in outline, some of the ways in which the human and poetic imagination has worked on the outward world in that later stage when the three great entities, God, Man, and Nature, were in thought clearly distinguished. Though in studying our present subject it may be necessary for clearness’s sake, in some measure to isolate Nature in thought from the other two great objects of contemplation, with which in reality it is so closely interwoven, we must never conceive of it as if it were really a separate and independent existence. However we may for a moment regard Nature by herself, we must not forget that in reality we can never contemplate it apart from the other two entities on which it depends; that Nature as mere isolated appearance, without a mind to contemplate and a power to support it, is meaningless; that all the three objects of knowledge coexist at every moment, interpenetrate and modify each other at every turn of thought; and that it is to the light reflected on Nature from the other two that she owes large part of her meaning, her tenderness, her suggestiveness, her sublimity.

The tendency to isolate Nature and to regard it as a self-subsisting thing cut off from other existence, has been strong ever since man came to be clearly conscious of his own distinctness from the world. In this, as in every other realm of thought, progress is slow; it requires long ages to get to the right mental attitude. Among the ethnic races, at least, there were first the two periods already noticed—one in which man crouched in blind abject terror in presence of the elements; another marked by that brighter Nature-worship embodied in the Aryan mythology, which, though past its prime, was still surviving when the Homeric poems were composed. Then succeeded the time when, on the one hand, the mind of man separated itself from the world and asserted its distinct existence; and when, on the other, the thought of Deity, under the guidance of reflection and philosophy, gradually extracted itself from the visible appearances in which it had been so long imbedded.

When this great change had made itself felt, and when, at the same time, out-of-door life gave place to life in cities, Nature in a great measure lost its hold on man’s regards, and retired into the background as a lifeless mechanical thing, without interest or beauty or any intimacy with man. The material world, indeed, had still its utilitarian value. It ministered to man’s bodily wants in the thousand ways that immemorial usage handed down, and which science in recent times has so greatly multiplied. If the refreshing presence of Nature still blended unawares with the animal spirits of men, and cheered them when they were weary, yet the multitudes cast on it no imaginative regards, and cared nothing for the poetry which mediates between the eye and the heart. This seems a true account of the mental attitude of the great civilized communities, down even to recent times. And, notwithstanding the great movement toward Nature which is said to characterize this modern era, one may well doubt whether the sentiment has really penetrated the hearts of even the most cultivated men. Such things must always be difficult to gauge. Yet one cannot but sometimes wonder, if from the modern love of Nature, and the much talk about it, there could be deducted all that may be set down to love of change, imitation, fashion, and the desire to meet the expectations of refined society, how much would remain of feeling that was native, genuine, and spontaneous.

A few, we may believe, there have been in every age, and more perhaps in this than in former ages, to whom, in spite of the prosaic atmosphere that surrounded them, Nature was something more than a dead machine, something even worthy of affection. Poets, too, were born from age to age, favorite children of

“Gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”

who had their hearts opened in a preëminent degree to receive the love of Nature themselves, and to awaken it in other hearts by the music which they lent to it. Yet neither the poets, nor the few apprehensive spirits who sympathized with them, could do much to make head against the prosaic ways of thinking by which they were surrounded. It was only with furtive and occasional glances that even the poets of past ages were allowed to look at Nature as they would, only by a kind of sufferance that they were allowed to express the tender love they felt for her. The feelings which they had in her presence were put down to imagination, which was a faculty of falsehood, and the words which they used regarding her were supposed to be tropes and hyperboles that had no meaning. The science and the philosophy, as well as the common belief which surrounded them, had settled it, that Nature was as inanimate as any piece of man’s manufacture. And what were a few poets, with their weak singing, a few dreamers, with their flimsy fancies, that they could withstand the tyrant tradition, even though, half unconsciously, all their highest inspiration witnessed against it? The instinctive faith of the poet cannot be vindicated till, not in Poetry only, but by Science and Philosophy also, the unity and the life that is in Nature are fully recognized,—till the whole visible world, not in trope and figure, but in literal truth, is felt to be the embodied thought of a mind which is in Nature and above it, and which fills the Universe. Not till this conviction has come home to man as a sober truth of reason, can we feel that Nature is intended to minister no furtive, but a legitimate delight to the eye, to furnish an interest to the understanding, beauty and suggestiveness to the imagination, calm and restoration to the heart. Otherwise she becomes, none the less for all her beauty, to those who fain would love her, a cruel and all-devouring Sphinx.

Not, however, that the poet busies himself with the question as to the essential nature of the material world, or inquires whether there can be found in matter any ultimate and permanent element. The analytic scrutiny of appearances is no part of his concern; this he willingly leaves to the physicist and the metaphysician to settle between them. Whether matter be ultimately resolvable into indestructible atoms out of which all visible forms are composed, or whether all that impinges on our senses be not at bottom one only force manifesting itself in infinite change, or whether in the last resort matter may be only “a permanent possibility of sensation,” or whether all force may not be regarded as the direct and immediate action of the Divine Will,—all these are questions with which, as poet, he does not intermeddle, though his knowledge that such questions can be asked may quicken his sense of the mystery of Creation which he contemplates. When poets have ventured to make such abstract questions the subject of their poetry, they have not generally succeeded. The poetic strength of Lucretius is not seen in his expositions, able though they are, of the atomic philosophy, but in his vivid representation of the manifold appearances of Nature, and in his broad and profound sense of the one universal life that pervades them all. The poet is in his proper place, not when he scrutinizes nature as an analyst, but when he unreservedly accepts all her concrete appearances as they come to him. Forms and colors are given him through the eye; sounds as they reach him through the ear; fragrances as wafted to his sense of smell. On this side of analysis there is enough, and more than enough, for him. The outward appearances he feels more intensely, and renders into words more graphically than ordinary men,—no other describes them so to the quick,—yet he does not rest in them, but passes with them inward and brings them into relation with his own being, or rather with the universal heart of man. The ethereal blue of the sky on a fine spring day delights every man, and something of the delight is no doubt due to the mere eye, to the adaptation of the object to the visual organ; but how much more—who shall say?—is due to the endless suggestiveness of the sight, even though of its manifold meaning nothing may shape itself into words. But it is the poet’s privilege not only to describe the outward image, but to draw out some of the many meanings that lie hid in it, and so render them as to win response from his fellow-men. It matters not, therefore, if it be true, that all men can know of Nature is the sensations it produces in himself. Even if this be all, it is enough for the poet. Leaving to others to deal with its physical uses as the feeder and supporter of the body, it is his to note how it exhilarates the animal spirits; how it passes into the imagination and there becomes rich in suggestiveness; how it entwines itself round the affections; how fruitful it is in resemblances and contrasts to human destiny; what large contemplations and high truths it presents to the reason; how even for conscience, though it contains no direct teaching of moral law, it supplies in its order and harmony the best visible images thereof. In fact, quite endless is the wealth of meaning that lies hid in Nature, the interchange of appeal and response that is possible between the world without and the world within. There is in Nature just as much, or as little, as the soul of each can see in her. And in order to see, the soul must have been trained for it both by habitual converse with the outward world, and also by converse with other regions of being, with other teachers. For other teachers are not less necessary than the beauty which lies in the face of Nature.

Poetry, we saw, is the emanation, the golden exhalation, as it were, which arises from the close and vivid meeting of the soul and the outward object. If this be so, the soul must needs contribute to the result not less than the object which appeals to it. What then must be the power and quality of that soul which is capable of taking in and making full and harmonious response to the whole appeal which Nature is continually making? There must be in the first place an eye to observe accurately what it sees, combined with the power to describe this faithfully in words uncolored and undeflected; in the first instance, by feelings or habits of thought which may be peculiar to the observer. There must be besides a sensibility to all outward appearances, as keenly alive to the vast as to the minute in Nature; to the great movements of the heavens and the breadths of light and shadow which they cast, not more than to the delicate veinings that are in the tiniest leaf, to the sighings that are among the reeds, and to the silent openings of the daisy and the celandine. These two qualities are mostly found among those whose childhood has passed in the country, who have known Nature as a household friend that has entwined itself among their first affections. No doubt there are cases of city-bred poets, such as Keats, who, having been shut out from free access to Nature till they were full-grown men, have then taken to it with an instinctive passion.[5] But even in these rare cases there will generally be felt in their descriptions something exaggerated, that shows the want of habitual familiarity with the ways of Nature, and makes us feel that it has been approached rather on set purpose as an object of artistic study, than known with the easy intimacy of early friendship. If to these two qualities we add imagination; even as penetrative as that of Keats, which went to the core of all it saw, even this outfit of qualities would not be sufficient adequately to render all that Nature contains of high and noble.

Such sensuous enjoyment of Nature, quickened by imagination, but unbalanced by deeper qualities, has led more than one, and especially in our own day, to an attempted revival of vanished Paganism, which, if made the key-note of any Poetry, is destructive of true manliness and of the highest human worth. By such a sensuous temperament, the forms and colors and fragrancies of the outward world may be deliciously enjoyed and vividly rendered. But this is all. The deeper tones that lie in the silences of Nature will be all inaudible, unless the ear be overhearing at the same time the deep music of the heart.

For the soul to apprehend all that Nature contains of meaning, there must be present not only the eye keenly observing, and tenderly sensitive to natural beauty, but behind this must be a heart feelingly alive to all that is most affecting in human life, sentiment, and destiny. And not only this, but in all survey of created things the upward look, unexpressed it may be, yet ever present, toward the Uncreated. It cannot but affect even the poet’s feeling about the most common material things, what may be his regards toward that Unseen Presence on which, not Nature only, but the spirit of man reposes. As he looks on the face of earth, sea, and sky, the thought, whence come these things, whither tend they, what is their origin and their end, must habitually enter in and color that which the eye beholds. It can hardly be but that a man’s inner thoughts about these things will find their way out and color the observation of his eye. Even the ethereal beauty of Shelley’s descriptions—his perception of the motion of clouds and shadows and sunbeams—his delight in all skyey and evanescent things too delicate for grosser eyes,—you cannot read them long without being crossed by some breath blown from his own distempered moral atmosphere. The “sky-cleaving” crags suggest to him heaven-defying minds, and his mountains have a voice “to repeal large codes of fraud and woe.” Byron,—though his later poetry contains noble passages on mountain scenery, even the high Alps are hardly strong enough to lure him into temporary forgetfulness of his own unhappy self, and his quarrel with mankind. In fact, so closely and deeply united are all the parts of the universe, that no one can apprehend the full compass of its manifold harmonies, whose own heart is not filled with that central harmony which sets it right with God and man.

CHAPTER III.
POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC WONDER.

But same one may ask, Is not imagination generally at war with reason and truth? Is not the quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy as old as the days of Plato? Did not he feel this so keenly that he banished poets as false teachers from his well-ordered State?

Luckily we have not to answer this question in all its breadth and complexity; we are not now called to defend the truth of Poetry in its delineations of human character and emotions. Our subject confines us to that simpler aspect of the question which concerns the action of imagination on the external world. When the eye rests on the ranging landscape, and the heart responds to the beauty of it, the emotion which is evoked is as true and as rational as is the action of any law of Nature. This kindling of heart in the presence of Nature may be said to be “another aspect of reason.” It is not confined to any one order of men or stage of civilisation, but belongs alike to the child, the peasant, and the philosopher, if only the heart be natural and unspoiled. No doubt the imaginative frame of mind differs in each according to difference of mental habits, but in all alike it is essentially one. It is a spontaneous and unconscious acknowledgment of the beauty of the Universe—a proof to those who think about it that the Universe was made for the soul of man, and the soul for the Universe, that there is between them a wonderful harmony, the one answering to the other as the harp-strings to the hand of the musician.

Take instances of this feeling, not from past times, but as it may exist in our own day. The Yarrow shepherd, as he goes forth at dawn and sees morning spread on the hills of the Forest, feels a momentary elevation of heart for which he has no words, and of which he may be but half-conscious; but in this feeling he has within him the first stirrings of that which, when the poet fashions it into fitting words, becomes an immortal song. His grandfather, a hundred years ago or less, when he saw the first streaks of dawn strike some lonely peak, or the early pencilings of light falling down into some hidden dell, embodied his feelings of that beauty in the imagination of Fairies retiring from their moonlight dances into the green knolls where they made their homes. The Ettrick Shepherd, in his childhood, was perhaps among the last who had a genuine feeling and belief of these symbols. They passed with him, but though the symbols have vanished the same appearances remain, and awaken the old feeling, and the feeling still needs a language.

So too was it with that Westmoreland dalesman who, as he walked with the poet Wordsworth by the side of a brook, suddenly said to him, with great spirit and a lively smile, “I like to walk where I can hear the sound of a beck.” Beck is the Westmoreland word for what in England is called a brook, in Scotland a burn. “I cannot but think,” adds the poet, “that this man, without being conscious of it, has had many devout feelings connected with the appearances which presented themselves to him in his employment as a shepherd, and that the pleasure of his heart was an acceptable offering to the Divine Being.” This is Wordsworth’s reflection. I shall but add that his liking to hear the sound of a beck was a proof that the outward sound had ceased to be a mere commonplace to him, and passing inward, had awakened an imaginative echo which is the birth of poetry.

Or take another instance—that youth, a shepherd lad, but more poet and philosopher than shepherd, whom Wordsworth describes watching the sunrise on the Highland mountains:—

“For the growing youth,

What soul was his, when from the naked top

Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun

Rise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked—

Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,

And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay

In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,

And in their silent faces did he read

Unutterable love. Sound needed none,

Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank

The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form

All melted into him; they swallowed up

His animal being; in them did he live,

And by them did he live; they were his life.

In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;

Rapt into still communion which transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,

His mind was a thanksgiving to the power

That made him; it was blessedness and love.”

As we read such a passage, the thought involuntarily arises, What if the said youth, instead of being a nursling of nature among the hills of Atholl, had been college-bred, and crammed with all the ’ologies which Physical Science now teaches, would he still have had the same elevated joy in presence of that spectacle? It is the old question which Plato asked, and which many since have asked down to our own time. In 1842 Haydon wrote to Wordsworth, recalling a dinner-party which took place many years before at the painter’s house: “Don’t you remember Keats proposing ‘Confusion to the memory of Newton,’ and upon your insisting on an explanation before you drank it, his saying, Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism?” Suppose the Atholl shepherd lad had been an optician, and understood all the laws of light by which the effulgent hues of sunrise were elicited; suppose, further, that he had been an astronomer, and as he saw the sunrise had begun to reflect, It is not the sun that I see rising, but it is the earth that is rotating on her own axis, and now turning her side toward the sun, that causes all that I now see; and that axis is not vertical, but slants obliquely to the plane of its orbit,—supposing these, and a hundred other truths, which Physical Astronomy teaches, had come into his mind, would he still have had that sublime joy?

Or suppose, again, he had been a geologist, and, as he gazed over the mountain ridges, had begun to think of them as a record of commotions that took place in far-back geological eras, and to reflect how the stratified layers of which these mountains are composed had been formed by the slime deposited at the bottom of a long since vanished sea; how they had been upheaved by the action of subterranean forces; how some of the great depressions which we call valleys, or those rents in the mountains, now filled by sea-lochs, had been caused by the cracking of the earth’s crust, while it was still a heated mass, glowing from the primeval fires; how other lesser glens and corries had been sculptured out of the solid earth by Nature’s graving tools, ice-wedges, glaciers, rain, and rivers,—in the presence of such scientific thoughts as these, what would become of the boy’s imaginative and devout ecstasy?

In answer, it may be said that whether the scientific man shall feel this spontaneous glow in the presence of the great spectacles of Nature or not, depends not on his scientific knowledge, but on his natural temperament, on the amount of soul there is in him, underlying his attainments. If he be so entirely the man of science, if the intellect has so entirely absorbed his being that he never gets beyond analyzing, comparing, and reasoning on the appearances he sees, then he will look without emotion on the grandest ongoings of Nature; he will see in them only a subject for investigation—nothing more. But if, as has often been the case, the physicist be a man not only of wide and accurate knowledge, but of large soul,—if his knowledge has become a part of him, has melted into his being, then his heart will be free to kindle and rejoice at the great things of Nature which he sees, as genuinely as the unreflecting child, the thoughtful peasant, or the most spontaneous poet.

As genuinely, but with a difference: the eye of the imaginative man of science will take in all that these others do, and more. His admiration will be fuller, larger, more instructed. The knowledge that has been gradually lodged in his mind, and become a part of it, will pass into his eye, and enable him to see, on whatever side of the Universe he looks, more complicated marvels, more wonderful correspondences.

“In Wonder,” says Coleridge, “all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends: and Admiration fills up the interspace.” The last clause I should change thus,—and Investigation fills up the interspace. In the first Wonder and in the last the Philosopher and the Poet are akin to each other. Both wonder, both admire what they see, but this incipient wonder tends to different results. The unscientific poet, just like the child and the thoughtful peasant, wonders at the beauty that is in the face of Nature, and at its mystery, seeks no physical explanations of it, but reads its moral and spiritual meaning, and tries to utter it. The man of science equally begins with wonder at what he sees, but his wonder leads him on to seek for an explanation, to search for the laws which regulate the appearances, if haply he may find them.

Then comes the long interspace of toilsome labor, of painful analysis, of rigorous induction. Experiment, analysis, deductive and inductive reasoning, by which chiefly Science works, are intellectual acts quite distinct from imaginative intuition and emotion, and, in some degree, opposed to them. It cannot be that these distinct processes can be combined in one intellectual act. They can hardly go on in one mind at the same time. While a man is immersed in these scientific processes, they preclude the poetic vision for the time. For many men they scare away poetry from the world forever.

Not so with the largest, most sovereign minds of Science. Lesser men of dry or narrow minds may be so entangled in the meshes of their own understanding as never to escape from them, or may find more delight in the cleverness of their own explanations than in the wonderful things which they explain. But the larger minds, when they have done their work, emerge in time from the study and the laboratory, and look abroad with expanded vision and profounder reverence on that Universe, some small part only of which it has been given them to understand. Kepler, after he had discovered so far the laws of planetary motion, said that all that he had been able to do was to read a few of the thoughts of God. A short time before his death, Newton is reported to have said, and I give the oft-told story in the authentic words, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”[6] A lesson surely to all future investigators, and, as his latest biographer has said, “to those especially who have never even found the smoother pebble or the prettier shell.” These great men, so feeling, are in the attitude of philosophic wonder—wonder both at part of the ways of God which it has been given them to see, and at that vaster part which they feel to lie beyond their vision. These laws which they have discovered, what are they? whence come they? They know that they themselves did not make them, only attained to catch sight of them. They know too that the laws did not make themselves. They are beautiful in themselves and in their benign operation; they are wonderful in their origin and continuance. This is what those great discoverers felt. And when they stood on the utmost verge of their scientific knowledge, and looked from what they had been allowed to see out upon the great beyond, they were rapt into that mood of wonder, akin to awe, which is the very essence of Poetry. Had they, in addition to their great scientific insight, been endowed with the gift of poetic utterance to express the wonder which they felt, they might have left to the world a poem of scientific truth transfigured by the imagination, such as has never yet been uttered.

Thus we see there is a poetic glow of wonder and emotion before Science begins its work; there is a larger, deeper, more instructed wonder when it ends. And either of these may naturally express itself in poetry, though the earlier wonder has done so far more frequently than the later. That the contemplation of the Universe does awaken this wonder in minds of the highest scientific order appears in the instances of Kepler and Newton. It has been shown in the case of an original discovery nearer our own day than either of these—I mean in that of Faraday. The following account of the imaginative delight which he felt in his scientific investigations I venture to quote from a very suggestive lecture of Mr. Stopford Brooke.

“Nature and her contemplation, says Professor Tyndall, produced in him a kind of spiritual exaltation: his delight in a sunset or a thunderstorm amounted to ecstasy. Our subjects are so glorious, he says himself, that to work at them rejoices and encourages the feeblest, delights and contents the strongest. In this delight and enchantment he was always in the temper of the poet, and, like the poet, he continually reached that point of emotion which produces poetic creation. Once, after long brooding on the subject of force and matter, he saw, and I am sure suddenly, as a poet sees a song from end to end before he writes it down,—he saw, as if lit by a stream of sudden light, the whole of the Universe traversed by lines of force, and these lines in their ceaseless tremors producing light and radiant heat; and dashing forward on the trail of his ideas, and thrilled into creation by the emotion which he felt, declared that these lines were the lines of gravitating force, and that the gravitating force itself constituted matter; that is, he made force identical with matter. It was a speculation which abolished at a stroke the atomic theory and the notion of an ether. Of the possibility of the truth of this I am no judge,” says Mr. Stopford Brooke. “Faraday himself calls it the shadow of a speculation. But who does not see that it proceeded after the manner of poetry; that in it poetry and philosophy went hand in hand? It was one of those inspired, sudden guesses which come to the poet who writes of the soul, coming to the philosopher who writes of the universe. In the midst of unremitting work at details suddenly a vision of the glory of the sum of things flashed upon his sight.”

CHAPTER IV.
WILL SCIENCE PUT OUT POETRY?

Here an interesting question suggests itself: What if the discoveries of Newton and Faraday were to become no longer the exclusive possession of the learned, but were to pass into the daily thoughts of the people? Would Poetry then be any longer possible? Were the scientific view of the Universe to become the popular one, were all men to regard the sight of the heavens and the earth, not with natural spontaneous eyes, but as the chemist, the astronomer, and the geologist teach us to regard them,—were scientific truth, in short, to supersede surface appearance,—would it be any longer possible to feel, as we look on the face of things, that free and intuitive delight out of which Poetry has hitherto been born? In a word, to express the fear which many hearts have felt, must not the march of Science trample out Poetry? Is not Poetry destined to disappear in this modern time, like many other things, once beautiful, but now antiquated?

To this the reply is, There is no fear that it will, as long as human nature remains what it is. If the view already taken of the genesis of Poetry be true, if man is so made that the vivid contact of his soul with reality or existence of any kind must generate that glow of emotion which is poetry, then it cannot be that any enlargement for him of the domain of reality which Science may effect shall be the death of Poetry. For, like Religion, to which it is akin, Poetry is thus seen to be a perennial and necessary growth, having its root, not only in the heart of man, but in the constitution of things, and in the adaptation of these, the one to the other. Science, however, though it can never eradicate the poetic feeling, may modify its nature, or rather may enlarge its range. But let it be clearly understood how it may do this. The processes of Science and of Poetry are radically distinct, and cannot be blended without confusion and injury to both. Experiment, analysis, reasoning inductive and deductive, these are the means by which Science makes its advances, and with these Poetry cannot rightly intermeddle. Imaginatively to contemplate the spectacle of the world is possible before Science has begun, it is possible, also, after it has completed its work. But it is not possible to combine imaginative contemplation and scientific investigation at the same time, and in one mental act. Only after analysis and reasoning have done their work and secured their results is the man of science free to look abroad on Nature with a poetic eye. Analysis and experimentalizing cannot by any possibility be made poetic, but their results may. Every new province of knowledge which Science conquers, Poetry may in time enter into and possess. But this can only be done gradually. Before imagination can take up and mould the results of Science, these must have ceased to be difficult, laborious, abstruse. The knowledge of them must have become to the poet himself, and in some measure to his audience, familiar, habitual, spontaneous. And here we see how finely Science and Poetry may interact and minister each to the other. If it be the duty of Science beneath seeming confusion to search for order, and its happiness to find it everywhere,—an order more vast, more various, more deeply penetrating, more intimate and minute than uninstructed men ever dreamed of,—wherever it reveals the presence of this, does it not open new fields for the imagination to appropriate? For what is order but the presence of thought, the ground of all beauty, the witness to the actual nearness of an upholding and moving Spirit? This is the vast new domain which Science is unveiling and spreading out before the eye of Poetry. And Poetry, receiving this large benefit, may repay the debt by using her own peculiar powers to familiarize men’s thoughts with the new regions which Science has won for them. If there is any office which Imagination can fulfill, it is this. She can help to bring home to the mind things which, though true, are yet strange, distant, perhaps distasteful. She can mediate between the warm, household feelings and the cold and remote acquisitions of new knowledge, and make the heart feel no longer “bewildered and oppressed” among the vast extent and gigantic movements of the Universe, but at home amongst them, soothed and tranquillized. Not, however, out of her own resources alone can Imagination do this. She must bring from the treasure-house of Religion moral and spiritual lights and impulses, and with these interpenetrate the cold, boundless spaces which the telescope has revealed. Some beginning of such a reconciling process we may see here and there in those poems of “In Memoriam” in which the Poet-Laureate has finely inwrought new truths of Science into the texture of yearning affection and spiritual meditation. Even where the views of Science are not only strange, but even at first crude and repulsive, Imagination can soften their asperity and subdue their harsher features. Just as when a railway has been driven through some beautiful and sequestered scene, outraging its quiet and scarring its loveliness, we see Nature in time return, and “busy with a hand of healing,” cover the raw wounds with grass, and strew artificial mounds and cuttings with underwood and flowers. It seems then that while Science gives to Poetry new regions to work upon, Poetry repays the debt by familiarizing and humanizing what Science has discovered. Such is their mutual interaction.

Mr. Stopford Brooke has told us that if on the scientific insight of Faraday could be engrafted the poetic genius of Byron, the result would be a poem of the kind “for which the world waits.” For “to write on the universal ideas of Science,” he says, “through the emotions which they excite, will be part of the work of future poets of Nature.” Likely enough it may be so. For if Poetry were to leave large regions of new thought unappropriated, being thus divorced from the onward march of thought, it would speedily become obsolete and unreal. But let us well understand what are the conditions of such poetry, the conditions on which alone Imagination can wed itself to scientific fact. The poet who shall sing the songs of Science must first be perfectly at home in all the new truths, must move among them with as much ease and freedom as ordinary men now do among the natural appearances of things. And not the poet only, but his audience must move with ease along the pathways which Science has opened. For if the poet has first to instruct his readers in the facts which he wishes imaginatively to render, while he expounds he will become frigid and unpoetic. Just as Lucretius is dull in those parts of his poem in which he has to argue out and to expound the Atomic Theory, and only then soars when, exposition left behind, he can give himself up to contemplate the great elemental movements, the vast life that pervades the sum of things. For in order that any truth or view of things may become fit material for poetry, it must first cease to live exclusively in the study or the laboratory, and come down and make itself palpable in the market-place. The scientific truths must be no longer strange, remote, or technical. If they have not yet passed into popular thought, they must at least have become the habitual possession of the more educated before the poet can successfully deal with them. This is the necessary condition of their poetic treatment. Wordsworth, in one of his Prefaces, has stated so clearly the truth on this subject that I cannot do better than give his words. “If the time should ever come,” he says, “when what is now called Science becomes familiarized to men, then the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed. He will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of Science itself. The poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.”

Science therefore may in some measure modify Poetry, may enlarge its range, may reveal new phases of it, but can never supersede it. The imaginative view of things which Poetry expresses is not one which can grow obsolete. It is not the child of any one particular stage of knowledge or civilization, which can be put aside when a higher stage has been reached. Any state of knowledge can give scope to it. Any aspect of the world, that seen by the savage as well as that of the sage, can awaken that imaginative glow of mind, that thrill of emotion, which, expressed in fitting words, is called Poetry. Only, as has been said above, before any aspect of nature, or fact of life, or truth of science, may be capable of poetic treatment, it must have become habitual and easy to the mind of the poet, and in some measure to that of his audience. In the poet’s mind, at least, it must have passed out of the region of mere head-notions into the warmer atmosphere of imaginative intuition, and, vitalized there, must have bodied itself into beautiful form and flushed into glowing color. For, to repeat once again what has been said at the outset, Poetry originates in the vivid contact of the soul—not of the understanding merely, but of the whole soul—with reality of any kind; and it is the utterance of the joy that arises, of the glow that is felt, from such soul-contact with the reality of things. When that reality has passed inward, and kindled the soul to “a white heat of emotion,” then it is that genuine Poetry is born.

CHAPTER V.
HOW FAR SCIENCE MAY MODIFY POETRY.

It may be worth while to dwell a little longer on the way in which Poetry and Science respectively deal with external Nature, noticing in what respects their methods agree, in what they differ, wherein they seem to modify each other, and how each aims at a separate and distinct end of its own.

The first thing to remark is, that in the presence of Nature the poet and the man of science are alike observers. But in respect of time the poet has the precedence. Long before the botanist had applied his microscope to the flower, or the geologist his hammer to the rock, the poet’s eye had rested upon these objects, and noted the beauty of their lineaments. The poets were the first observers, and the earliest and greatest poets were the most exact and faithful in their observations. In the Psalms of Israel and in the Poems of Homer how many of the most beautiful and affecting images of Nature have been seized and embalmed in language which for exactness can not be surpassed, and for beauty can never grow obsolete! Indeed, fidelity to the truth of Nature, even in its minutest details, may be almost taken as a special note of the higher order of poets. It is not Homer but Dryden who to express the silence of night makes the drowsy mountains nod. It is a vulgar error which supposes that it is the privilege of imagination to absolve the poet from the duty of exact truth, and to set him free to make of Nature what he pleases. True imagination shows itself by nothing more than by that exquisite sensibility to beauty which makes it love and reverence Nature as it is. It feels instinctively that “He hath made everything beautiful in his time;” therefore it would not displace a blade of grass nor neglect the veining of a single leaf. Of course, from the touch of a great poet, the commonest objects acquire something more than exactness and truth of detail; they become forms of beauty, vehicles of human sentiment and emotion. But before they can be so used, fidelity to fact must first be secured. They cannot be made symbols of higher truth unless justice has first been done to the truth of fact concerning them. Hence it is that the works of the great poets of all ages are very repositories in which the features and ever-changing aspects of the outward world are rendered with the most loving fidelity and “vivid exactness.” This is one very delicate service which genuine poets have done to their fellow-men. They have by an instinct of their own noted the appearance of earth and sky, and kept alive the sense of their beauty during long ages when the world was little heedful of these things. How many are there who would own that there are features in the landscape, wild-flowers by the way-side, tender lights in the sky, which they would have passed forever unheeded, had not the remembered words of some poet awakened their eye to look on these things and to discern their beauty! Who ever now sees the “wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,” and notes the peculiar coloring of the petals, without a new feeling of beauty in the flower itself, and of the added beauty it has received since the eye of Burns dwelt so lovingly upon it!

The observation of the world around them in those early poets, clear and transparent, was instinctive, almost unconscious. It proceeded not by rules or method, but was spontaneous, prompted by love. What Mrs. Hemans finely says of Walter Scott among his own woods at Abbotsford, may be said of all the great poets in their converse with Nature—

“Where every tree had music of its own,

To his quick ear of knowledge taught by love.”

Likely enough it will be said, that spontaneous, child-like kind of observation was all well enough in the pre-scientific era. But now, in this day of trained observation and experiment, have not the magnifying-glass of the botanist and the crucible of the chemist quite put out the poet’s vocation as an observer of natural things? Have not these taught us truth about Nature, so much more close, exact, and penetrating, as to have discredited altogether that mere surface observation which is all that is possible to the poet? In the presence of this newer, more sifting investigation, can the imagery of the poets any longer live? Has not the rigorous analysis of modern times, and the knowledge thence accruing, abolished the worth and meaning of that first random information gathered by the eye?

In reply, may it not be said the observations of the poet have real meaning and truth, but it is a different kind of truth which the poet and the man of science extract from the same object? The poet, in as far as he is an observer at all, must be as true and as accurate in the details he gives as the man of science is, but the end which each seeks in his observation is different. In examining a flower, the botanist, when he has noted the number of stamens and petals, the form of the pistil, the corolla, the calyx, and other floral organs,—when he has registered these, and so given the flower its place in his system, his work is done. These things, too, the poet observes, and in his descriptions, if he does not give them a place, he must at least not contravene them; but he observes them as means to a further end. That end is to see and express the loveliness that is in the flower, not only the beauty of color and of form, but the sentiment which, so to speak, looks out from it, and which is meant to awaken in us an answering emotion. For this end he must observe accurately, since the form and hues of the flower discerned by the eye are a large part of what gives it relation and meaning to the soul. The outward facts of the wild-flowers he must not distort, but reverently observe them; but, when observed, he must not rest in them, but see them as they stand related to the earth out of which they grow, to the wood which surrounds them, to the sky above them, which waits on them with its ministries of dew, rain, and sunshine,—indeed, to the whole world, of which they are a part, and to the human heart, to which they tenderly appeal.

On this wide subject, the bearing of scientific on poetic truth, I know not where can be found truer and more suggestive teaching than that contained in Mr. Ruskin’s great work on Modern Painters. Each volume of that work, which has influenced so powerfully the painting of our time, has much to teach to the poet and to the student of Poetry. In the Preface to the Second Edition many of the principles expanded throughout the work are condensed. From that Preface I venture to quote one or two passages which throw much light on the subject of our discussion:—

“The sculptor is not permitted to be wanting either in knowledge or expression of anatomical detail.... That which to the anatomist is the end is to the sculptor the means. The former desires details for their own sake; the latter that by means of them he may kindle his work with life, and stamp it with beauty. And so in landscape: botanical or geological details are not to be given as a matter of curiosity or subject of search, but as the ultimate elements of every species of expression and order of loveliness.”

Again: “Details alone, and unreferred to a final purpose, are the sign of a tyro’s work.... Details perfect in unity and contributing to a final purpose are the sign of the production of a consummate master. It is not details sought for their own sake ... which constitute great art,—they are the lowest, most contemptible art; but it is detail referred to a great end, sought for the sake of the inestimable beauty which exists in the slightest and least of God’s works, and treated in a manly, broad, and impressive manner. There may be as much greatness of mind, as much nobility of manner, in a master’s treatment of the smallest features, as in his management of the more vast; and this greatness of manner chiefly consists in seizing the specific character of the object, together with all the great qualities of beauty which it has in common with the higher orders of existence.”

Once more: “This is the difference between the mere botanist’s knowledge of plants and the great poet’s or painter’s knowledge of them. The one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his herbarium, the other that he may render them vehicles of expression and emotion. The one counts the stamens, affixes a name, and is content; the other observes every character of the plant’s color and form; considering each of its attributes as an element of expression, he seizes on its lines of grace or energy, rigidity or repose, notes the feebleness or the vigor, the serenity or tremulousness of its hues; observes its local habits, its love or fear of peculiar places, its nourishment or destruction by particular influences; he associates it in his mind with all the features of the situations it inhabits and the ministering agencies necessary to its support. Thenceforward the flower is to him a living creature, with histories written on its leaves and passions breathing in its motion. Its occurrence in his picture is no mere point of color, no meaningless spark of light. It is a voice rising from the earth, a new chord of the mind’s music, a necessary note in the harmony of his picture, contributing alike to its tenderness and its dignity, nor less to its loveliness and its truth.”

If in the observation of Nature the ends which the poet has in view and the effects which he brings out are different from those aimed at by the man of science, not less distinct are the mental powers which each brings into play. The man of science investigates that he may reach rigid accuracy of fact, and this he does by the exercise of the dry understanding, and by the use of the analytic method. The poet contemplates the single objects or the vast spectacle of Nature, in order that he may discern the beauty that pervades both the parts and the whole, and that he may apprehend the intimations—the great thoughts, I might call them—which come to him through that beauty, and which make their appeal to the power of imaginative sympathy within him. Nature, whether in detail or as a whole, he regards in the relation it bears, whether of likeness or of contrast, to the soul, the emotions, and the destiny of man. But this relation he must seize, not by neglecting or setting aside facts, but by noting them with all the fidelity consistent with his main purpose.

But it may be well to mark more definitely some of the ways in which the extension of natural science in modern times has reacted on the work of the poet.

1st. It had fallen in with, though it has not originated, that remarkable change in the mental attitude in which modern times stand toward Nature, a change of which more will have to be said presently, but which it is enough here to allude to. For that ardent, sensitive, reverent regard which the modern time turns on Nature, recent research may be said to have furnished a rational basis, a sufficient justification. Not that Science created this mental attitude, this new-born sentiment; it is due to other, more subtle and hidden causes. Indeed, it may be that the two great contemporaneous influences, the increased activity of physical discovery working by scientific analysis, and the enlarged and heightened admiration of Nature as seen through the imagination, are but opposite sides of the one great current of modern thought. Shelley speaks of the “intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England,” and this, though by no means a product of physical science, is in keeping with its revelations, though it goes beyond and supplements them.

2d. Again: the greatest of the early poets, as we have seen, were instinctive lovers of Nature, and faithful delineators of its forms. But in presence of the unresting scrutiny and careful exactness of Science, modern poets are stimulated to still closer, more minute observation. Indeed, there may be danger lest this tendency in Poetry go too far, and make it too microscopic and forgetful of that higher function which, while seeing truly, ever spiritualizes what it sees. However this may be, it is clear that Science by its contagion has stimulated the observing powers of the modern poet, and made him more than ever a heedful

“Watcher of those still reports

Which Nature utters from her rural shrine.”

3d. Again: since the progress of modern Science has let in on the mental vision whole worlds of new facts and new forces,—a height and a depth, a vastness and minuteness in Nature, as she works all around us, alike in the smallest pebble on the shore, and “in the loftiest star of unascended heaven,”—it cannot be but that all this now familiar knowledge should enter into the sympathetic soul of the poet, and color his eye as he looks abroad on Nature. When the eye, for instance, from the southern beach of the Moray Firth passes over to its northern shore, and rests on the succession of high plateaux and precipiced promontories which form the opposite coast, and observes how the whole landscape has been shaped, moulded, and rounded into its present uniformity of feature by the glaciers that untold ages since descended from Ben Wyvis and his neighboring altitudes, and wore and ground the masses of old red sandstone into the outlines of the bluffs he now sees,—who can look on such a spectacle without having new thoughts awakened within him, of Nature working with her primeval wedges of frost, ice, and flood, to carve the solid rock into the lineaments before him, and of the still higher power behind Nature that directs and controls all these her movements to ulterior and sublimer ends! When, in addition to these thoughts, the gazer calls to mind that these are the native headlands which first arrested the meditative eye of the great northern mason, more than any other, geologist and poet in one, and fed the fire of his young enthusiasm, does not the geologic charactery that is scrawled upon these rocks receive a strange enhancement of human interest?

Again: the huge gray bowlders strewn here and there on the top of those promontories, and all about the dusky moors, when we learn that they have been floated to their present stations from leagues away by long vanished glaciers, no doubt their gaunt shapes become wonderfully suggestive. And yet, perhaps, nothing that geology can teach regarding them will ever invest them with a more imaginative aspect than that which they wore to the poet’s eye, when, caring little enough for scientific theories, it shaped them into this human phantasy—

“As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie

Couched on the bald top of an eminence;

Wonder to all who do the same espy

By what means it hath hither come, and whence;

So that it seems a thing endued with sense;

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.”

But no doubt the truths of geology, if known to a poet, will in some measure enter into his description of scenery. For as the geological structure of a country powerfully moulds and determines its features, the knowledge of this, if possessed, must enter into the poet’s eye as it ranges over the landscape. How powerfully geological causes are to modify scenery is well set forth in a passage of the same Preface of Mr. Ruskin’s from which I have already quoted.

The new light which the discovery of these fads throws upon scenery cannot now well be neglected by the poet. And it is impossible to divine how many new facts and farther vistas into the recesses of Nature future discovery may open up, which, when they have passed into the educated mind, poets must in their own way find expression for. But one thing is clear, the poet, however he may avail himself of scientific truth, must not himself merge the Poet in the investigator or analyst. That function he must leave to the physicist, and be content to employ the material with which the physicist furnishes him to enrich and enlarge his vision of beauty. Moreover, the scientific facts he uses must not be those which are still abstruse and difficult, but those with which educated men at least have already become familiar. But, above all, the poet, if he is not to abdicate his function, must retain that freshness of eye, that childlikeness of heart, which looks forth with ever-young delight and wonder and awe on the great spectacle which Nature spreads before him. Most men have lost this gift, their spirits being crushed beneath the dead weight of custom. Our boasted civilization and education have done their best to destroy it; so that now it has come about that to the dull mechanic mind this marvelous earth is but a black ball of mud, painted here and there with some streaks of green and gold. To the drily scientific mind, which fancies itself educated, it is merely a huge piece of mechanism, like some great mill or factory, worked by forces which he proudly tabulates and calls Laws of Nature. But to the true poet the earth and sky have not yet lost all their original brightness. His eye still sees them with the dew upon them, in inspired moments still catches sight of the visionary gleam. His gift it is, his peculiar function, seeing this himself, to make others see and feel it, to make his fellow-men sharers in his perceptions and in the joy they bring. He purges our dulled eyes as with euphrasy and rue, and opens them to partake of the vision which he himself beholds. For after all the sciences have said their say, and propounded their explanations of things, as far as they go, the poet feels that there is in this visible Universe, and the spectacle it presents, something more than all the sciences have as yet grasped or ever will grasp—feels that there is in and through and behind all Nature a mysterious life, which he “cannot compass, cannot utter,” but which he must still bear witness to. This great truth which lay at the bottom of the old mythologies, which gives meaning to many forms of mysticism, but which our dull mechanic philosophies have long discredited, still haunts the soul of the poet, and, feeling it profoundly himself, he longs to express and make others feel it.

CHAPTER VI.
THE MYSTICAL SIDE OF NATURE.

4th. The mystical feeling which the contemplation of Nature has awakened in poets of every age, but which our own day has so greatly expanded, while it is not directly suggested by Science, yet finds support from its disclosures. That great spectacle which from earliest ages has thrilled the poet’s soul with rapture and awe we know now to be produced by recognized laws, to be interpenetrated by numberless well-ordered forces, which, are indeed but thought localized, reason made visible. The intuitive wonder which the earliest poet felt is more than justified by the latest discoveries of Science.

And yet, be it observed, whatever support the truths of Science may give to the poet’s instinctive perceptions, it is not on the physical causes and operations revealed by Science that his eye chiefly dwells. He has an object of contemplation which is distinct from these and peculiar to himself, and that is the Beauty which he sees in the face of the Universe. Over and above the physical laws which uphold and carry on this framework of things, beyond all the uses which this mechanism subserves, there is this further fact, this additional result, that all these laws and forces in their combination issue in Beauty. This Beauty, while it is created by the collocation and harmonious working of the physical laws, is a thing distinct from them and their operation. It is an aspect of things with which the physicist as such does not intermeddle, but it is as real and as powerful over the minds of men as any force which Science has disclosed. Modern discovery may have enlarged and intensified it, but has in no way originated it. In this Beauty the poet from the first has found his favorite field, the main region of his energy. For ages the vision of this beauty has haunted, riveted, fascinated him. And if he is no longer as of old its sole guardian, he is still, whether speaking through verse or prose, its best and truest interpreter. This truth, that the Beauty of Nature is something in thought distinct, though in fact inseparable from the machinery of Nature, has been brought out and dwelt on with remarkable power by Canon Mozley in his most suggestive sermon on “Nature.” And he further insists with great force on the truth that it is this spectacle of beauty produced by the useful laws which is the special province of the poet:—

“He fixes his eye upon the passive spectacle, upon Nature as an appearance, a sight, a picture. To another he leaves the search and analysis; he is content to look, and to look only; this, and this alone, satisfies him; he stands like a watcher or sentinel, gazing on earth, sea, and sky, upon the vast assembled imagery, upon the rich majestic representation on the canvas.”[7]

It is then the spectacle of beauty produced by the combination of physical laws, this beauty, and not the physical laws which produce it, on which the poet fixes his gaze. In the presence of it the poet’s first mental attitude is one of pure receptivity. As the clear windless lake, spread out on a still autumn day, takes into its steady bosom every feature of the surrounding mountains, every hue of the overhanging sky, so is his soul spread out to receive into itself the whole imagery of Nature. When this wise passiveness has been undergone, what images, sentiments, thoughts the poet will give back depends on the capaciousness, the depth, the clearness of soul within him. The highest poetry of Nature is that which receives most inspiration from the spectacle, which extracts out of it the largest number of great and true thoughts. And a thought or idea, as Mr. Ruskin has taught us, “is great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies and, in occupying, exercises and exalts the faculty by which it is received.”

There are no doubt poets who are mainly taken up with the forms and colors of things, and yet no poet can rest wholly in them, for this, if for no other reason, that in the power of rendering them his art necessarily falls so far below that of the painter. Even those poets who deal most humbly with Nature must, when they endeavor to make us feel its visible beauty, link the outward forms and colors to some simple thoughts of animal delight, or of comfort, or of childhood, or of home affection. This much he must do, if only to make them vivid, to bring them home to us. But he who does not go beyond this has not attained to those higher secrets of Nature, which are open to the meditative imagination. When a reflective man comes on some sudden beauty of scenery in the wilderness where no man is, how often has the thought arisen that all this beauty cannot be wasted on vacancy, that though man comes not that way to see it, there must be other eyes that behold the spectacle,—one Eye at least by which it is not unseen.

Whether we regard the beauty as something wholly external to us, as lying outside of us on the face of Nature, or as a creation resulting from the combination of certain external qualities, and of an intelligent mind which perceives them, whichever of these views we take, the beauty is there, no mere dream or phantasy, but something to whose existence the soul witnesses, as truly as the eye does to the existence of light or of those motions which perceived are light. What is it, whence comes it, what means it? It is not something we can reason from as we can from marks of contrivance and design. It will not lend itself to any syllogism. But notwithstanding this, or perhaps owing to this, it awakens deeper thoughts, it carries the mind farther than any mere proofs of design can do. The beautiful aspect of the outward world, and the delight which it inspires, are no doubt proofs of a goodness somewhere which supports these, just as food and air are proofs of it. But they are more: they have a mystic meaning, they are hints and intimations of something more than eye, or ear, or mere intellect discover. If the outward world and the mind of man are so constructed that they fall in with, and answer to, each other,—if mere physical qualities, such as height, depth, expansion, silence, solitude, sunshine, shadow, gloom, affect the soul in certain well-known ways, awakening in us emotions of awe and wonder, of peace, gladness, sadness, and solemnity,—we naturally ask ourselves, after being thus moved, why is it we were so affected, what is it in the outward world which awakens these emotions? It is a natural question for those who have felt the strange impulses from the changeful countenance of the world. It was not mere shape or color that so affected them: these feelings did not come by chance, they were not without meaning; they point to something outside of themselves, something inherent in the truth of things. When the spirit within them was so stirred, they felt that that which so addressed them, though it came through physical things, was more than physical, was spiritual. For it carried their thoughts and feelings quite out of the natural and physical appearances, till they found themselves in commune with something akin to their own spirits, though higher and vaster. The beauty which came to them through eye, ear, and imagination, they felt to belong to the same order as that which more directly addresses their moral heart and conscience. It was the Great Being behind the veil who comes to us directly through the conscience, coming more indirectly, but not less really, through the eye and ear. Not otherwise can we account for the intense love which the sights and sounds of Nature have awakened in the best and purest of men, and the more so as they grew in maturity and serenity of soul.

It is a true instinct when men are led to regard the beauty of the world that comes to them through the eye, and the moral light which shines from behind upon the soul, as coming from one centre, and leading upward to the thought of one Being who is above both. In this way all visible beauty becomes a hint and a foreshadowing of something more than itself. But if Nature is to be the symbol of something higher than itself, to convey intimations of Him from whom both Nature and the soul proceed, man must come to the spectacle with the thought of God already in his heart. He will not get a religion out of the mere sight of Nature, neither from the uses it subserves as indicating design, nor from the beauty it manifests as hinting at character. No doubt beauty is a half-way element, mediating between the physical laws and the moral sentiments, partaking more of the latter than of the former, as being itself a spiritual perception. No doubt it does in some measure act as a reconciler between those two elements which so often seem to stand out in contrast irreconcilable. But if it is to do this, if it is really to lead the soul upward, man must come to the contemplation of it with his moral convictions clear and firm, and with faith in these as connecting him directly with God. Neither morality nor religion will he get out of beauty taken by itself. If out of the splendid vision spread before him—the sight of earth, sea, and sky, of the clouds, the gleams, the shadows—man could arrive directly at the knowledge of Him who is behind them, how is it that in early ages whole nations, with these sights continually before them, never reached any moral conception of God? how is it that even in recent times many of the most gifted spirits, who have been most penetrated by that vision, and have given it most magnificent expression, have been in revolt against religious faith? It is because they sought in Nature alone, that which alone she was never intended to give. It is because the spectacle of the outward world, however splendid, if we begin with it, and insist on extracting our main light from it, is powerless to satisfy our human need, to speak any word which fits in to man’s moral yearning. Nay, Nature taken alone will often appear no benign mother at all, no dwelling-place of a kindly spirit, but an inexorable and cruel Sphinx, who rears children and makes them glad a little while, only that she may the more relentlessly destroy them.

But he who takes the opposite road, who, instead of looking to visible Nature for his first teaching, begins with the knowledge of himself, of his need, his guilt, his helplessness, and listens to the voice that tells of a strength not his own, and a redemption not in him but for him, he will learn to look on Nature with other and calmer eyes, and to discern a meaning in it which taken by itself it cannot give. Man may then find in the beauty which he sees a hint and intimation of a higher beauty which he does not see—a something revealed to the eye which corresponds to the religious truth revealed to the heart, harmonizing with it and confirming it. He can regard the glory of Nature, not only in itself and for its own sake, but as the foreshadow and prophecy of a higher glory yet to be. And so the sight of Nature, instead of intoxicating, maddening, and rousing to rebellion, soothes, elevates, spiritualizes, chiming in unison with our best thoughts, our purest aspirations.

Canon Mozley, in his sermon on “Nature” already alluded to, has dwelt very powerfully on this, as the use which the highest Poetry makes of Nature, and has shown that it is at once in accordance with the teaching and practice of Scripture, and true to our human instincts. He shows how sight, the noblest of our senses here, is made the pattern and type of the highest attitude of the soul hereafter. For heaven is represented as “a perfected sight,” and he who attains to it is to be a beholder. It is not mere self-rapt thought or inward contemplation, but a future vision of God which is promised. Meanwhile Nature and her works are employed in Scripture, not only as proofs of goodness in God, but also as symbols representative of what He has in keeping for them who shall attain. Out of the storehouse of Nature are taken the materials—the light the rainbow, the sapphire, and the sea of glass—to set forth, as far as can be set forth, the things that shall be,—sight, the noblest sense here, made the type of the highest mental act hereafter; and Nature the spectacle given to employ sight now, and to adumbrate the things that shall be in heaven:—this is the high function assigned by Scripture to sight and to Nature.

When, therefore, in the light of these thoughts we study Nature in this, her highest poetic aspect, we may well feel that we are engaged in no trivial employment, but in one befitting an immortal being. Even the most common acts of minutely observing Nature’s handiwork may in this way partake of a religious character. How much more when the great spectacle of Nature lends itself to devout imagination, and becomes as it were the steps of a stair ascending toward the Eternal!

CHAPTER VII.
PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY.

The thought with which the last chapter closed opens up views which are boundless. Through the imaginative apprehension of outward Nature, and through the beauty inherent in it, we get a glimpse into the connection of the visible world with the realities of morality and of religion. The vivid feeling of Beauty suggests, what other avenues of thought more fully disclose, that the complicated mechanism of Nature which Science investigates and formulates into physical law is not the whole, that it is but the case or outer shell of something greater and better than itself, that through this mechanism and above it, within it, and beyond it, there lie existences which Science has not yet formulated—probably never can formulate—a supersensible world, which, to the soul, is more real and of higher import than any which the senses reveal. It is apprehended by other faculties than those through which Science works, yet it is in no way opposed to science, but in perfect harmony with it, while transcending it. The mechanical explanation of things—of the Universe—we accept as far as it goes, but we refuse to take it as the whole account of the matter, for we know, on the testimony of moral and spiritual powers, that there is more beyond, and that that which is behind and beyond the mechanism is higher and nobler than the mechanism. We refuse to regard the Universe as only a machine, and hold by the intuitions of faith and of Poetry, though the objects which these let in on us cannot be counted, measured, or weighed, or verified by any of the tests which some physicists demand as the only gauges of reality. This ideal but most real region, which the visible world in part hides from us, in part reveals, is the abode of that supersensible truth to which conscience witnesses,—the special dwelling-place of the One Supreme Mind. The mechanical world and the ideal or spiritual are both actual. Neither is to be denied, and Imagination and Poetry do their best work when they body forth those glimpses of beauty and goodness which flash upon us through the outer shell of Nature’s mechanism.

But

“Descending

From these imaginative heights,”

we must turn to the humbler task of showing by a few concrete examples how Imagination has actually worked on the plastic stuff supplied by Nature. To this the readiest way would be to turn to the works of the great poets, and see how they, as a matter of fact, have dealt with the outward world. Before doing so, however, a few words may be given to the marks which Imagination has impressed on Nature in the prehistoric and preliterary ages. The record of this process lies imbedded in two fossil creations, Language and Mythology.

Language.—In the very childhood of the race, long before regular poetry or literature were thought of, there was a time when Imagination, working on the appearances of the visible world, was the great weaver of human speech, the most powerful agent in forming the marvelous fabric of language. It has long been well known to all who have given attention to the subject, that Metaphor has played a large part in the original formation of language. But how large that part is has only been recently made evident by the researches of Comparative Philology. Metaphor, as all know, means “the transferring of a name from the object to which it properly belongs to other objects which strike the mind as in some way resembling the first object.” Now this is the great instrument which works at the production of a large portion of language. And Imagination is the power which creates metaphor, which sees resemblances between things, seizes on them, and makes them the occasion of transferring the name from the well known original object to some other object resembling it, which still waits for a name. Even in our own day newly-invented objects are often named by metaphor, but metaphors thus consciously formed belong to a later age. Long before such metaphors were formed, Imagination had been silently and unconsciously at work, naming the whole world of mental and spiritual existences by metaphors taken from visible and tangible things. It is quite a commonplace that the whole vocabulary by which we name our souls, our mental states, our emotions, abstract conceptions, invisible and spiritual realities, is woven in the earliest ages by the Imagination from the resemblances which it seemed to perceive between the subtle and still unnamed things of mind, and objects or aspects of the external world. This is not so easily seen in the English language, because owing to our having borrowed almost all our words expressive of mental things from other languages, the marks of metaphor are to our eyes obliterated. In fact all our words for mental and spiritual things are like coins which, having passed through many hands, have had the original image and superscription nearly quite worn out. None the less these are still to be traced by those who have their eyes exercised to it by reason of use. But it is manifest in German, which has spun a large part of its philosophical vocabulary out of native roots. It may be seen, in some measure, in Latin, but much more in Greek philosophical language.

This whole subject has been so well handled and so amply illustrated by Professor Max Müller in the Second Series of his Lectures on “the Science of Language,” and in Archbishop Trench’s instructive and delightful volumes on “Words,” that I can but refer to these works and make here a few excerpts from them as examples of the general principle of thought to which I have adverted. Locke, as Professor Müller shows, long ago asserted that in all languages “names which stand for things which fall not under our senses have had their first rise from sensible ideas.”

Our word “spirit” comes from the Latin spiritus, the breath, and spiro, to breathe; so animus, the soul, a seat of the affections, and anima, the living principle, are connected with the Greek ἄνεμος, wind. Indeed, anima is sometimes used in Latin for a breeze, as readers of Horace will remember, and all are connected with the Greek verb ἄω, to blow. πνεῦμα, the Greek word used in Scripture to express spirit and a spiritual being, originally means wind and breath, from the verb πνέω, to blow and to breathe. Again, ψυχή, life and soul, is connected with ψύχω, which in Homer means to breathe, to blow. So that in all these cases we see that men, when they first became aware of an invisible and spiritual principle within themselves, named it by an act of imagination from the most impalpable entity their senses perceived,—the wind, or the breath. Again, take our word “ideal.” It comes from the Greek ἰδέα, from ἰδεῖν, to see, originally a word of sight, expressing the look or appearance of a thing, which Plato in time employed to express the most spiritual entities, the supersensible pattern of all created things. Again, our words “imagination” and “imaginative,” how have they been formed? The Latin word imaginatio occurs but rarely; more frequently the verb imaginor, to picture to one’s self; more frequent still is imago, as if imitago, from imitor, to imitate. This last is connected with the Greek verb μιμέομαι, meaning also to imitate; and the original of these, and all the cognate words, both Latin and Greek, is the Sanscrit root mâ, to measure. So from this very palpable process of measuring the land, there have been spun all the subtle and delicate words that express the working of imagination. So the mental processes expressed by “apprehend,” “comprehend,” and “conceive,” are all derived from bodily processes, and mean respectively to grasp at a thing with the hand, to grasp a thing together, to take and hold together. Again, the word “perceive,” from the Latin percipere, was in the language of husbandry used for the farmer gathering in the fruits of his fields and storing them in his garner. Was then the mind conceived of as a husbandman who gathers in the notices of sense from the outer world, and stores them in an invisible garner? To “inculcate:” here is another mental word borrowed from husbandry. It means to tread or stamp firmly in with the heel, and was used of the farmer, who, with his foot or some instrument, carefully pressed home into the earth the seed which he had sown. We see how well the metaphor can be transferred to the process of careful teaching—to the clergyman, for instance, who inculcates religious truth. These are but a few obvious and well-known samples of a process which has gone on in all languages, and has furnished forth our whole stock of names for mental operations and spiritual truths. And Imagination has been the power which has presided over the process, the interpreter mediating between two worlds, and naming the unseen realities of the inner world by analogies which she perceives in them to the sensible objects of the outer. Disciples of the Hume philosophy will see in these facts of language a confirmation of their master’s dictum that all ideas and thoughts are but weak and faded copies of the more vivid impressions first stamped on the senses. But those who have been learners in another school, to whom the world of thought has more power and reality than the world of sense, they will read in these facts a different lesson, that He has made all things double, the one over against the other, and that the thought by which both are pervaded is one.

Truly then has it been said, “Language is fossil poetry.” And any one who will set himself to spell out those fossils, and the meanings they contain, will find a wonderful record of the way in which the mind of man has wrought in their formation. This record will lead him down into layers of thought as varied as any which the geologist deciphers, filled with more subtle and marvelous formations than any animal or vegetable fossils. For full exposition and illustration of the mental processes by which so large a portion of language has been created, the reader should turn to Professor Müller’s volume, to which I have already referred.

Wholly different from this primeval process of naming things by unconscious metaphors is the modern metaphor, as we find it in the poets. When Shelley speaks of the moon as

“That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,

Whom mortals call the Moon,”

he is using a metaphor, and a very fine one, but he does so with perfect consciousness that it is a metaphor, and there is not the least danger of the poet, or any one else, confounding the moon with any maiden, earthly or heavenly.

Again, when Mrs. Hemans addresses the moaning night-winds as

“Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!

At whose tones my heart within me burns,”

there is no likelihood of any confusion between the winds and mortal singers, no chance of the metaphor ever growing into mythology.

Once more: to return to Shelley—

“Winter came; the wind was his whip

One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills,

And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,

His breath was a chain that without a sound

The earth, and the air, and the water bound;

He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne

By the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”

Here is not only metaphor, but personification so strong and vivid that it is only kept from passing into mythology by the conscious and reflective character of the age in which it was created.

Mythology.—The other great primitive creation wrought by the action of the human imagination, in its attempts to name and explain the appearances of visible Nature, was ancient mythology. That huge unintelligible mass of fable which we find imbedded in the poets of Greece and Rome has long been a riddle which no learning could read. But just as modern telescopes have resolved the dim masses of nebulæ into distinct stars, so the resources of that modern scholarship called Comparative Philology seems at last on the way to let in light on the hitherto impenetrable secret of the origin of religious myths. It has gradually been made probable that the Olympian gods, whatever capricious shapes they afterward assumed, were in their origin but the first feeble efforts of the human mind to name the unnamable, to give local habitation and expression to the incomprehensible Being who haunted men’s inmost thoughts, but was above their highest powers of conception. In making this attempt, the religious instinct of our Aryan forefathers wrought, not through the abstracting or philosophical faculty, but through the thought-embodying, shaping power of imagination, by which in later ages all true poets have worked, that in the dim foretime fashioned the whole fabric of mythology. It was the same faculty of giving a visible shape to thought.

As soon as man wakes up to think of himself, what he is, how he is here, he feels that he depends not on himself, but on something other than and independent of himself; that there is One on whom “our dark foundations rest.” “It is He that made us, and not we ourselves;” this is the instinctive cry of the human heart when it begins to reflect that it is here, and to ask how it came here. This consciousness of God, which is the dawn of all religion, is reached not as a conclusion reasoned out from premises, not as a law generalized from a multitude of facts, but as a first instinct of intelligence, a perception flashed on the soul as directly as impressions are borne in upon the sense, a faith which may be afterward fortified by arguments, but is itself anterior to all argument.[8] When this thought awoke, when men felt the reality of “that secret thing which they see by reverence alone,” how were they to conceive of it, how name it? for a name was necessary to retain any thought as a permanent possession, much more this thought, the highest of all thoughts. The story of the well-known Dyaus, or the formation of this name for the Supreme God, has been told so often of late by Professor M. Müller, in his various works, that I should not have ventured to repeat it after him once again, had it not been necessary for the illustration of my present subject. It has been proved that in almost all the Aryan languages—Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic—the name for the Highest, the Supreme Being, has sprung from one root. “The Highest God received the same name in the ancient mythology of India, Greece, Italy, Germany, and retained the name whether worshiped on the Himalayan mountains or among the oaks of Dodona, or in the Capitol of Rome, or in the forests of Germany.” The Sanscrit Dyaus, the Greek Zeus, the Latin Jupiter (Jovis), the Teutonic Tiu (whence our Tuesday), are originally one word, and spring from one root. That root is found in Sanscrit, in the old word dyu, which originally meant sky and day. Dyaus therefore meant the bright heavenly Deity. When men began to think of the incomprehensible Being who is above all things, and comprehends all things, and when they sought to name Him, the name must be taken from some known visible thing, and what so natural as that the bright, blue, boundless, all-embracing, sublime, and infinite vault, which contains man and all that man knows, should be made the type and symbol to furnish that name?

When the old Aryan people, before their dispersion, thus named their thought about the Supreme as the Shining One, Professor Müller does not think that it was any mere personification of the sky, or Nature-worship, or idolatry that led to their so naming Him. Rather he thinks that that old race were still believers in one God, whom they worshiped under the name Heaven-Father. This inquiry, however, lies beyond our present purpose. What it more concerns us now to note is that it was a high effort of thought to make the blue, calm, all-embracing sky the type and symbol of the Invisible One, and that the power which wrought out that first name for the Supreme was Imagination working unconsciously, we might almost say involuntarily—the same power which in its later conscious action, under control of the poet’s will, has found a vent for itself in Poetry.

In the same way Comparative Philology accounts for all the stories about the beautiful youth Phœbus Apollo, Athene, and Aphrodite.

“I look,” Professor Müller says, “on the sunrise and sunset, on the daily return of night and day, on the battle between light and darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principal subject of early mythology. I consider that the very idea of Divine powers sprang from the wonderment with which the forefathers of the Aryan family stared at the bright (deva) powers that came and went no one knew whence or whither, that never failed, never faded, never died, and were called immortal, i. e., unfading, as compared with the feeble and decaying race of man. I consider the regular recurrence of phenomena an almost indispensable condition of their being raised, through the charms of mythological phraseology, to the rank of immortals: and I give a proportionably small place to the meteorological phenomena, such as clouds, thunder, and lightning, which, although causing for a time a violent commotion in nature and in the heart of man, would not be ranked together with the immortal bright beings, but would rather be classed together as their subjects or as their enemies.”

In this eloquent passage Professor Müller expresses his well-known “Solar Theory” of mythology. At the close of the passage he alludes to a counter theory which has been called the Meteoric, which makes mythology find its chief field, not in the calm and uniform phenomena of the sun’s coming and going, and of day and night, but in the occasional and violent convulsions of storm, thunder, and earthquake. Not what is fixed and uniform, but what is sudden and startling, most arrests the imagination, according to this latter theory. But it does not concern us here to discuss the claims of these rival views, but rather to remark that in both alike it is the imagination in man to which the aspects of heaven, whether uniform or occasional, calm or turbulent, make their appeal, and that when, according to that tendency of language noted by Professor Müller, words assume an independent power and dominate over the mind instead of being dominated by it, it is Imagination which throws itself into the tendency, and takes occasion from it to weave its many-tissued, many-colored web of mythologic fable.

But however adequate such theories may be to people the whole Pantheon of Olympus, they seem quite out of place when brought to account for the inhabitants of this lower world. Nothing can seem less likely than that the conceptions of Achilles and Hector can have arisen from myths of the dawn. Characters that stand out so firmly drawn, so human and so natural, in the gallery of human portraiture, can hardly have been shaped out of such skyey materials. One could as readily believe that Othello or Macbeth had such an origin.

It is easy to laugh at those early fancies which men dreamed in the childhood of the world, and took for truth; and to congratulate ourselves that we, with our modern lights of Science, have long outgrown those mythic fables; but with the exacter knowledge of the world’s mechanism which Science has taught us, is there not something we have lost? Whither has gone that fine wonder with which the first men gazed on the earth and the heavens from the plains of Iran and Chaldea? It lies buried beneath the mass of second-hand thought and information which Science has heaped upon us. Would it not be well if we could win back the truth, of which a dull mechanical or merely logical way of thinking has long robbed us, that the outward world, with all its movements, is not a mere dead machine, going by ropes and pulleys and cog-wheels, but an organism full of a mysterious life, which defies our most subtle analysis, and escapes us when placed in the crucible? This feeling, that things are alive and not dead, rests at the bottom of all mythology, the one root of truth underlying the huge mass of fable. How to regain this perception of something divine in Nature, more than eye and ear discover, and to do this in harmony with all the facts and laws which Science has ascertained, this is a problem reserved for thoughtful men in the future time.

CHAPTER VIII.
SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH POETS DEAL WITH NATURE.

Those who have not given attention to the subject are apt to imagine that the chief creators of mythological fables were the poets, and especially Homer. They suppose that the early poets, by sheer power of imagination, invented those stories to adorn their poems, and so gave them currency among the people. It was not so. Even Homer, the earliest poet whom we know, belonged to an era when the myth-creating instinct was past its prime, and already on the wane. The fables of the gods, their loves and their quarrels, as these appear in his poems, there is no reason to suppose that he created them or imagined them for the first time. It would rather seem that they had been long current in popular belief, and that he only used and gave expression to stories which he found ready-made. Here and there in Homer you may still detect some traces of the mythologizing tendency still lingering, and catch the primitive physical meaning of the myth shining through the anthropomorphic covering which it afterward assumed. Such glimpses we get in Zeus, when he gathers the clouds in the sky, when he rouses himself to snow upon men and manifests his feathery shafts, when he rains continuously, when he bows the heavens and comes down upon the peaks of Ida. Or again, when Poseidon, the earth-encompassing, the earth-shaker, yokes his car at Hegeæ and drives full upon the Trojan strand: I take the passage from Mr. Cordery’s translation of the Iliad:—

“He entered in,

And there beneath his chariot drew to yoke

Fast-flying horses, maned with flowing gold,

Hooved with bright brass; and girt himself in gold,

Took golden goad, and sprang upon the car;

So forth upon the billows, round whose path

Huge monsters gamboled, gathering from the depth

Afar, anear, and joyous knew their lord;

Ocean for gladness stood in sunder cloven,

Whilst lightly flew the steeds, nor ’neath the car

The burnished axle moistened with the brine:—

Thus tow’rd the fleet his coursers bore the god.”

Here we have, half-physical, half-mythological, like Milton’s half-created lion, the fore part perfect, the hinder part still clay, a well-known natural appearance. After the storm-winds are laid, but while the sea still feels their power, it is thus that the high-crested breakers may be seen racing shorewards with their white manes backward streaming, and glorified with rainbow hues from a bright dawn or a splendid sunset poured upon them from the land.

But for the most part, even Homer, early poet though he was, has quite forgotten that original aspect of Nature out of which each god was shaped, and has invested them with entirely human attributes, even with human follies and vices, which have no connection at all with the primary fact, but are the wildest freaks of extravagant fancy. If then even Homer has so much forgotten the physical origin of his mythic gods, how must it be with the tragic poets! Æschylus and Sophocles we see have entirely put aside the immoral fables about them, and are anxious to find the truth which lies at the root of the popular belief, and to moralize the whole conception of the gods. When we come down to the Latin poets, we do not find even this effort; but the gods they have borrowed from Greece are used as mere poetic machines, with as little of either physical or moral meaning as a modern romance-writer might use fairies, gnomes, or hobgoblins.

Although in the more imaginative of modern poets, modes of conceiving Nature, and expressions every here and there crop out, which in an earlier age would certainly have flowered into mythology, it is nevertheless true that, ever since the literary age set in, poets in general have viewed Nature with a more familiar eye, and described it in language which ordinary speech would not disown. I shall now endeavor to classify the several ways in which Nature is dealt with by the poets, the several aspects of it which enter most prominently into Poetry. It will be enough for my present purpose merely to generalize, under a few heads, the most obvious of these forms, without attempting to analyze them or to account for them.