‘Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,’
who store our souls with memories that vibrate at the sight of daffodils and violets and stars.
And the imagination goes further yet, interpenetrates the whole of nature, transforms it, makes it a living, sentient unity, wholly unlike the dead multiplicity on which the scientist exercises his ingenious research. Take Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and compare it with Darwin’s book on Earthworms. The Darwin has its fascination: it makes you long to spend your days watching and testing and measuring the tiny creatures who are forever making over the surface of the globe. But the Emerson transfuses all this natural world with thought, with creative human intelligence, dissolves it, moulds it, re-creates it, tosses and turns it till it seems a ball and a trifle for the overmastering soul of man to produce or abolish as it will. Or again, with Wordsworth, there is the sense of animating life in nature, the dim, impersonal personality, which is for ever passing and repassing through the endless manifestations that are all the scientist can count or measure,
‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts.’
And as there is the sense of this profounder life in nature, this deeper, mysterious unity, back of all the varied shift and change, so there is the passionate desire to be at one with that unity, to lose one’s miserable, insignificant, turbulent, tormenting I in that vast, illimitable, measureless All. There is the thirst of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’:
‘That sustaining love,
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of