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following brief reply to certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England and on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The Renascence of Wonder,' Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of Rossetti. The phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only but the entire world of conscious life--the impulse of acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder. The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of my life has been the reading of _The Veiled Queen_, your father's hook of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great picture symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin's vignette. Since the original writing of Aylwin, many years ago, I have enlarged upon its central idea in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and in the introductory essay to the third volume of Chambers's _Cyclopaedia of English Literature_, and in other places. Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon the 'Renascence of Wonder in Religion.' I am tempted to quote some of his words:-- Amongst the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund, there is one of which part was already known to have occurred in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It runs as follows:--'Let not him that seeketh cease from his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have rest.'...We believe that Butler was one of the first to share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the renascence of religion....Men saw once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man's destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the lifelong struggle of the soul, of the power of the unseen. The wor
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