now
hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl:

Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
And winds shall waft it to the powers above.
But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
The wondering forests soon should dance again;
The moving mountains hear the powerful call,
And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.

This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language
of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite
absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of
nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but
it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt
his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in
Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:

Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,
When thus his moan he made:--

'Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,
Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,
That in some other way yon smoke
May mount into the sky.
If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough,
Headlong, the waterfall must come,
Oh, let it, then, be dumb--
Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.'

Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a waterfall to
be silent, if it is not to hang listening: but with what different
relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of
its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same
moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible,
in a vague impression that a miracle _might_ be wrought to give relief
even to a less sore distress,--that nature is kind, and God is kind,
and that grief is strong: it knows not well what _is_ possible to such
grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,--one might think
it could do as much as that!

Sec. 16. I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main
point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as
it _is_ a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind,
and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it
is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what
has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the
thoughts