Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/234

204 to be more exact, the transcription of nature's effect upon himself, seemed to him a sane, even a sacred vocation. In fact, a lofty, if not inventive, imagination, and

gave him for this faith a warrant which all his ponderous homiletics could not render null. As he let The modern return to nature. "the misty mountain winds" blow on him, he was nature's living oracle. And the world soon yielded to the force of that "pathetic fallacy" which has imparted to modern thought a distemper and a compensation: the refuge, be it real or illusionary, still left to us, and so compulsive that neither reason nor science can quite rid us of it when face to face with nature,—when soothed by the sweet influences of our mother Earth. It is true, in Landor's words, that

But Ruskin avers that the illusion under which we fondly believe nature to be the sympathetic participator of our sentiment or passion, and which he terms the pathetic fallacy, is incompatible with a clear-seeing acceptance of the truth of things.

Now, that there is a solace—a companionship—found The "pathetic fallacy." in nature none can doubt. It is as old as the fable of Antæus. Primitive races feel it so strongly that they inform all natural