As the audience whom I addressed consisted mainly of young persons whose chief employments lay elsewhere than in libraries, I felt that I had no right to reckon on any wide acquaintance with English literature. This will account for the occurrence in the later chapters of many well-known passages of English Poetry, which to persons at all conversant with letters may seem too familiar even for quotation. If, however, the passages quoted served to illustrate the views I wished to impress, I was not desirous to travel beyond well-worn paths. In treating of a subject which has in recent years engaged the thoughts of many distinguished men, it could not but be that I should often come across and use the thoughts of others. No doubt it is not easy always to discriminate between thoughts that have risen spontaneously to one's own mind, and those which have been suggested by other writers. Whenever I have been aware that I was using thoughts not my own, I have tried to make due acknowledgment of this in the text. At the same time I would wish to acknowledge here more expressly how much I am conscious of obligation to three living writers, to Canon Mozley of Oxford, for suggestions received from his sermon on "Nature," and incorporated in my chapter on "the mystical side of Nature; " to Mr. Stopford Brooke for suggestive generalizations contained in his "Theology in the English Poets; "and to Mr. Leslie Stephen for some true and new thoughts in his recent Essay on Wordsworth's Ethics; some thoughts derived from the two latter writers I have tried to interweave into the last chapter of my book. As to the book itself, I am well aware how small a portion of how vast a subject it has even attempted to deal with. But, as the original lectures were written, so this book is meant, mainly for the young. If, however, it should induce any of these to look on the outward world with more heedful and thoughtful eyes, and to win thence for themselves finer observations, and deeper delight, it will have served a good end. ST. SALVATOR'S COLLEGE, ST. Andrews, THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. CHAPTER I. THE SOURCES OF POETRY. POETRY, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals, two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric Man and Nature. Yet such a statement seems hardly adequate. For is there not in all high Poetry, whether it deals with Nature or with Man, continual reference, now latent, now expressed, to something which is beyond and above both? This reference has taken many shapes, and uttered itself in many ways, according to the belief and civilization of each age and country. But by whatever mists and obstructions it has been colored and refracted, it has never been wholly absent from true Poetry, and has been working itself clearer, and making itself more powerfully felt, as the world grows older. The Higher Life encompassing the life both of Man and of Nature; the deeper Foundation on which both ultimately |