Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/235

Rh objects with sentient individual lives; our more advanced intelligence conceives of a universal spirit that comprehends and soothes Earth's children. In our own youth, nature haunts us "like a passion;" and as concerning the youth of a race we "cannot paint what then "we were, in mature years each of us can say,

This has never been expressed so well as in Wordsworth's elevated phrases. They must always be cited. But a disenchantment is at last Expressions of the old feeling and the new doubt. upon us, and we are sternly questioning our reason. Is not nature's apparent sympathy, we ask, a purely subjective illusion? The old belief, the new doubt, are well conveyed in the early and later treatment of a favorite theme,—the moaning of a sea-shell held to the ear. In Landor's "Gebir" we have it thus:—

The shell's murmur, as idealized by Landor and Wordsworth.