‘My notion is this,’ said Guy,—‘there is danger in listening to a man who is sure to misunderstand the voice of nature,—danger, lest by filling our ears with the wrong voice we should close them to the true one. I should think there was a great chance of being led to stop short at the material beauty, or worse, to link human passions with the glories of nature, and so distort, defile, profane them.’
‘You have never read the poem, so you cannot judge,’ said Philip, thinking this extremely fanciful and ultra-fastidious. ‘Your rule would exclude all descriptive poetry, unless it was written by angels, I suppose?’
‘No; by men with minds in the right direction.’
‘Very little you would leave us.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Amabel. ‘Almost all the poetry we really care about was written by such men.’
‘Shakspeare, for instance?’
‘No one can doubt of the bent of his mind from the whole strain of his writings,’ said Guy. ‘So again with Spenser; and as to Milton, though his religion was not quite the right sort, no one can pretend to say he had it not. Wordsworth, Scott—’
‘Scott?’ said Philip.
‘Including the descriptions of scenery in his novels,’ said Amy, ‘where, I am sure, there is the spirit and the beauty.’
‘Or rather, the spirit is the beauty,’ said Guy.