fact of natural
history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of
poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is
called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts
that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use
those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol
of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a
freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to
live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the
symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this
habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly
with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by
Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of
the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars
was a mere idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space,
clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were
a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in
our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men
still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us
that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a
solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a
fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights
of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of
natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the
planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have
had a planetary patriotism, in which the green leaf should be like a
cockade, and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been
proud of what our star has wrought, and worn its heraldry haughtily in
the blind tournament of the spheres. All this, indeed, we may surely do
yet; for with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing
happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES

There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded,
for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great
enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open
to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all qu