you reply that men and beasts are different, they will answer that in
this point they do not recognise the difference. 'Poor beast! let him
live out his little life.' And they will give him grass and water till
he dies.

This is the exception that I meant, but now, after I have written it, I
am not so sure. Is it an exception?

CHAPTER XXI

ALL LIFE IS ONE

'I heard a voice that cried,
"Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead,"
And through the misty air
Passed like the mournful cry
Of sunward-sailing cranes.'
TEGNER'S _Drapa_.

All romance has died out of our woods and hills in England, all our
fairies are dead long ago. Knowledge so far has brought us only death.
Later on it will bring us a new life. It is even now showing us how this
may be, and is bringing us face to face again with Nature, and teaching
us to know and understand the life that there is about us. Science is
telling us again what we knew long ago and forgot, that our life is not
apart from the life about us, but of it. Everything is akin to us, and
when we are more accustomed to this knowledge, when we have ceased to
regard it as a new, strange teaching, and know that we are but seeing
again with clearer eyes what a half-knowledge blinded us to, then the
world will be bright and beautiful to us as it was long ago.

But now all is dark. There are no dryads in our trees, nor nymphs among
the reeds that fringe the river; even our peaks hold for us no guardian
spirit, that may take the reckless trespasser and bind him in a rock for
ever. And because we have lost our belief in fairies, because we do not
now think that there are goblins in our caves, because there is no
spirit in the winds nor voice in the thunder, we have come to think that
the trees and the rocks, the flowers and the storm, are all dead things.
They are made up, we say, of materials that we know, they are governed
by laws that we have discovered, and there is no life anywhere in
Nature.

And yet this cannot be true. Far truer is it to believe in fairies and
in spirits than in nothing at all; for surely there is life all about
us. Who that has lived out alone in the forest, that has lain upon the
hillside and seen the mountains clothe themselves in lustrous shadows
shot with crimson when the day dies, who that has heard the sigh come up
out of the ravines where the little breezes move, that has watched the
trees swa