I had nothing particularly pleasing to think
about; but the mood of retrospect and anticipation seemed to ramble
about, picking sweet-smelling flowers from the past and future alike. I
seemed to desire nothing and to regret nothing. My cup was full of a
pleasant beverage, neither cloying nor intoxicating, and the glad
spring-time tempered it nicely to my taste. There seemed to brood in
the air a quiet benevolence as of a Father watching His myriad children
at play; and yet as I saw a big blackbird, with a solemn eye, hop round
a thorn-bush with a writhing worm festooned round his beak, I realised
that the play was a deadly tragedy to some of the actors. I suppose
that such thoughts ought to have ruffled the tranquil mood, but they
did not, for the whole seemed so complete. I suppose that man walks in
a vain shadow; but to-day it only seemed that he disquiets himself in
vain. And it was not a merely selfish hedonism that thrilled me, for a
large part of my joy was that we all seemed to rejoice together. As far
as the eye could see, and for miles and miles, the flowers were turning
their fragrant heads to the light, and the birds singing clear. And I
rejoiced with them too, and shared my joy with all the brave world.

LVIII

One of the most impressive passages in Wordsworth's poems describes how
he rowed by night, as a boy, upon Esthwaite Lake, and experienced a
sense of awestruck horror at the sight of a dark peak, travelling, as
the boat moved, beyond and across the lower and nearer slopes, seeming
to watch and observe the boy. Of course it may be said that such a
feeling is essentially subjective, and that the peak was but obeying
natural and optical laws, and had no concern whatever with the boy.
That there should be any connection between the child and the bleak
mountains is, of course, inconsistent with scientific laws. But to
arrive at a scientific knowledge of nature is not at all the same thing
as arriving at the truth about her; one may analyse everything, peak
and lake and moonlight alike, into its component elements, and show
that it is all matter animated and sustained by certain forces. But one
has got no nearer to knowing what matter or force is, or how they came
into being.

And then, too, even from the scientific point of view, the subjective
effect of the contemplation of nature by the mind is just as much a
phenomenon; it is there--it demands recognition. The emotions of man
are a scientific