that for song!
That age, when not by laws inanimate,
As men believed, the waters were impelled,
The air controlled, the stars their courses held;
But element and orb on _acts_ did wait
Of Powers endued with visible form instinct,
With will, and to their work by passion linked."

Clearly mythology and nature-poetry are closely allied though
centuries come between: they breathe the same air though
"creeds outworn" have yielded place to deeper faiths. And we are
driven to ask--Is poetry in its turn to go?--poetry, at any rate,
of the old, simple, direct sort? Reflective reason is asserting
itself: critical methods play havoc with the spontaneous
creations of imagination. Coleridge, in one of his moods, would
almost persuade us so. In his "Piccolomini" Max is conversing
with the Countess:

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty and the majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason."

And yet Coleridge did not allow that the outlook was wholly
sad. His young soldier continues:

"But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names."
. . . and even at this day
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
And Venus who brings everything that's fair."

No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in
human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others--
critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness
of experience--but behind each natural phenomenon is the
immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness,
which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust.
The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will
always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the
world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its
inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is
immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic
keenness of perception allied with feeling.

"For Nature beats in perfect time
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle i