Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of Rossetti. The phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only but the entire world of conscious life—the impulse of acceptance—the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of my life has been the reading of The Veiled Queen, your father's hook of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great picture symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin's vignette. Since the original writing of Aylwin, many years ago, I have enlarged upon its central idea in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in the introductory essay to the third volume of Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature, and in other places. Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon the 'Renascence of Wonder in Religion.' I am tempted to quote some of his words:—
Amongst the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund, there is one of which part was already known to have occurred in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It runs as follows:—'Let not him that seeketh cease from his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have rest.'…We believe that Butler was one of the first to share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the renascence of religion….Men saw once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man's destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the lifelong struggle of the soul, of the power of the unseen.
The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately be used as a motto for Aylwin and also for its sequel The Coming of Love: Rhona Boswells Story.
PREFACE TO THE TWENTY-SECOND EDITION OF 1904
Nothing in regard to Aylwin has given me so much pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh friends and my Romany friends. I little thought, when I wrote it, that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4000 people by a man so well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent and famous 'Gypsy Smith,' and described by him as 'the most trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language, containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy girl.'
And as regards my Welsh readers, they have done me the honour of suggesting that an illustrated edition of the work would be prized by all lovers of 'Beautiful Wales.'
Although such an edition is, I am told, an expensive undertaking, my friend and publisher, Mr. Blackett, sees his way, he tells me, to bringing it out.
Since the first appearance of the book there have been many interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals, upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of Snowdon.
A very picturesque letter appeared in Notes and Queries on May 3rd, 1902, signed C. C. B. in answer to a query by E. W., which I will give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer's ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend Harry Owen, late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that taken by Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent spectacle that was seen by them:—