fountain her Nymph, making Pan and Echo meet in the forest glade. When
the mythological instinct has ceased to be active, it results in
sentimental description, sometimes realistic in detail, sometimes
largely or even wholly conventional. It has always in it something of
a reaction, real or affected, from crowds and the life of cities, an
attempt to regain simplicity by isolation from the complex fabric of
society.

Once more, the feeling for Nature may go deeper than the senses and
the imagination, and become moral. The outer world is then no more a
spectacle only, but the symbol of a meaning, the embodiment of a soul.
Earth, the mother and fostress, receives our sympathy and gives us her
own. The human spirit turns away from itself to seek sustenance from
the mountains and the stars. The whole outer universe becomes the
visible and sensible language of an ideal essence; and dawn or sunset,
winter or summer, is of the nature of a sacrament.

There is over and above all these another sense in which we may speak
of the feeling for Nature; and in regard to poetry it is perhaps the
most important of all. But it no longer follows, like the rest, a sort
of law of development in human nature generally; it is confined to
art, and among the arts is eminent in poetry beyond the rest. This is
the romantic or magical note. It cannot be analysed, perhaps it cannot
be defined; the insufficiency of all attempted definitions of poetry
is in great part due to the impossibility of their including this
final quality, which, like some volatile essence, escapes the moment
the phial is touched. In the poetry of all ages, even in the periods
where it has been most intellectual and least imaginative, come sudden
lines like the /Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des etoiles/ of
Corneille, like the /Placed far amid the melancholy main/ of Thomson,