en
special odes or sonnets on all the four; some like Keats, in his
"Ode to Autumn," have lavished their most consummate art on
the season which most appealed to them. Each month, too, has
its bards; its special group of qualities and the sentiments they
stimulate. Truly the heart of the nature-mystic rejoices as he
reflects on the inexhaustibility of material and of significance
here presented!

And what of the flowers? Once again the theme is inexhaustible.
The poets vie with one another in their efforts to give
to even the humblest flowers their emotional and mystic
setting. Some of the loveliest of the old-world myths are busied
with accounting for the form or colour of the flowers.
Wordsworth's Daffodils, Burns's Daisy, Tennyson's "Flower in
the Crannied Wall," these are but fair blooms in a full and
dazzling cluster. Flowers (said a certain divine) are the sweetest
things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into. The
nature-mystic thankfully acknowledges the sweetness, but he questions
the absence of the soul! The degree of individuality is matter for
grave debate; but to assume its absence is to place oneself out of
focus for gaining true and living insight into nature's being.
How much more deep-founded is Wordsworth's faith "that
every flower enjoys the air it breathes."

Let us bring this matter to the test in regard to the big brothers
of the flowers--the trees. Passing by the ample range of striking
and beautiful myths and legends (packed as many of them are
with mystic meaning), let us turn to the expressions of personal
feeling which the literature of various ages provides in
abundance--limiting the view to certain typical examples. The
Teutonic myth of the World-tree was dealt with fully in the
chapter on Subterranean Waters. But it is well to mention it now
in connection with the far-extended group of myths which
centre in the idea of a tree of life, which preserved their vitality
in changing forms, and which even appear in Dante in his
account of the mystical marriage under the withered tree. Virgil
was a lover of trees; the glade and the forest appealed to him by
the same magic of suggested life as that which works on the
modern poet or nature-lover.

It is generally supposed that, in England, the loving insight of
the nature-mystic was practically unknown until Collins,
Thomson, and Crabbe led the way for the triumph of the Lake
poets.

This may be true for many natural objects--but it is