We murder to dissect.
And so it is in the philosophy and poetry of Romanticism that we first feel a true understanding, not indeed of the process itself, but of the results of that process, which has been traced in this book under the name of “internalization”. Slowly the divers of the Romantic expedition brought up to the surface of consciousness that vast new cosmos which had so long been blindly forming in the depths. It was a cosmos in which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved out of Nature and into man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece, the witches and fairies and charms and enchantments of Romance—all these had been locked safely in man’s bosom, there to sleep until the trump of Romanticism sounded its call to imagination to give back their teeming life to Nature. “O Lady”, wrote Coleridge in that most heartrending of all poems, wherein, like the disconsolate knight awaking on the barren heath, he reports the decay in himself of this very power:
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud