nced as they of the near presence of the divine.

The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and
augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a
like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude,
we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as
they speed along their vanishing roads.

This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn
"pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of
course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror
of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal
affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods
with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but
we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of
correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the
very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts
into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into
ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue
simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot
formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the
reach of common doubt--a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might
say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and,
therefore, of our own being as a part thereof.

In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that
those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time
moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and
that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us;
that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first
somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no
less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form
and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair.

It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has
made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in
the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or
shaped a nightingale and filled it wi