it
cannot give life and spirit. All merely descriptive poetry can do is
to give a dead catalogue--to kill the butterfly, and then write a
monograph on it. And, therefore, there comes a natural revulsion
from the baldness and puerility into which Wordsworth too often fell
by indulging his false theories on these matters.

But a revulsion to what? To the laws of course which underlie the
phenomena. But again--to which laws? Not merely to the physical
ones, else Turner's "Chemistry" and Watson's "Practice of Medicine"
are great poems.

True, we have heard Professor Forbes's book on Glaciers called an
epic poem, and not without reason: but what gives that noble book
its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but
the discovery of those laws: the methodic, truthful, valiant,
patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his
wresting from her the secret which had been locked for ages in the
ice-caves of the Alps, guarded by cold and fatigue, danger and
superstitious dread. For Nature will be permanently interesting to
the poet, and appear to him in a truly poetic aspect, only in as far
as she is connected by him with spiritual and personal beings, and
becomes in his eyes either a person herself, or the dwelling and
organ of persons. The shortest scrap of word-painting, as Thomson's
"Seasons" will sufficiently prove, is wearisome and dead, unless
there be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a
living figure, the scene is deliberately described with reference to
the poet or the reader, not as something in itself, but as something
seen by him, and grouped and subordinated exactly as it would strike
his eye and mind. But even this is insufficient. The heart of man
demands more, and so arises a craving after the old nature-mythology
of Greece, the old fairy legends of the Middle Age. The great poets
of the Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar
craving. But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are
regarded by them is most significantly different. With Spenser and
Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their
fancied connection with man. Even in the age of Pope, when the gods
and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery,"
this is their work. But among the moderns it is as connected with
Nature, and giving a soul and a personality to her, that they are
most valued. The most pure utterance of this feel