ind to grasp the immanent
idea, and it presents those images as instinct with life and
movement--sometimes it goes so far as to personify them. This
is what Matthew Arnold meant when he declared poetry to be
"simple, sensuous, passionate." Coleridge has a good illustration
(quoted by Nisbet). He observes that the lines:

"Behold yon row of pines that shorn and bowed
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve"--

contain little or no poetry if rearranged as a sentence in a book
of topography or description of a tour. But the same image, he
says, rises into the semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

"Yon row of black and visionary pines
By twilight glimpse discerned! Mark how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them."

The difference in the two presentations consists in this, that in
the second of them there is a suggestion of life and movement
which is lacking in the first. But why the different effect upon
the mind? Nisbet answers--"the visual and motor centres
contribute to the creation of the image"--an answer admirably
typical of the fashionable psychology of the day, not necessarily
wrong in itself, but so curiously incomplete! Nisbet holds that
man himself is a machine, and thus could not easily go farther--
especially as his own machinery evidently would not work any
farther. The nature-mystic begins at the other end. He holds that
even the inorganic world is more than machinery--that it is
instinct with life and meaning. When, therefore, life and
movement are attributed to seemingly inert or motionless
objects, there is a responsive thrill caused by the subconscious
play of primitive intuitions that are based on the facts of
existence. Spirit realises more vividly than in normal experience
that it is in touch with spirit.

Contrast with the psychological dictum the proud claim
advanced by Emerson.

"The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the reach of the old sea-shore
With melody divine.
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men,
Whom the ages must obey."

There are two claims presented here--one directly, the other
indirectly. The direct claim is that there are seers and
interpreters who can catch the mystic words that nature utters.
The indirect is that the general mass of humanity have the
capacity for sharing the experi