n the light of
"childhood's fancy." The nature-mystic avers that what he
deemed a recurrence of meaningless, if pleasant, "well-worn
thoughts" was really an approach to the heart of nature from
which an imperfect understanding of the place and function of
science had carried him away. Not that the old forms should be
perpetuated, but that the childlike insight should be cherished.

Water in movement in brooks and streams! Have we discovered
the secret of it when we tell of liquids in unstable equilibrium
which follow lines of least resistance? It is a valuable advance
to have gained such abstract terms and laws, so long as we
remember they _are_ abstractions. But it is a deadly thing to
rest in them. How infinitely wiser is Walt Whitman, in his
address to a brook he loved, than the man who coldly analyses,
with learned formulae to help him, and sees and feels nothing
beyond. "Babble on, O brook" (Walt Whitman cries), "with that
utterance of thine! . . . Spin and wind thy way--I with thee a
little while at any rate. As I haunt thee so often, season by
season, thou knowest, reckest not me (yet why be so certain--
who can tell?)--but I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee--
receive, copy, print, from thee."

Is this to indulge in vague anthropomorphic fancies--though not
of the cruder sort, still of subjective value only? The
persistence, the vividness, and the frequency of such
"imaginings" prove that the subjective explanation does not tell
the whole tale. How natural, in the simplest sense of the word,
is Coleridge:

"A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."

How earnest is Wordsworth as he opens out glimpses of
unknown modes of being in his address to the Brook:

"If wish were mine some type of thee to view
Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do
Like Grecian artists, give the human cheeks
Channels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be,--
Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs;
It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,
And hath bestowed on thee a safer good;
Unwearied joy, and life without its care."

Again, what natural feeling declares itself in the delightful
Spanish poem translated by Longfellow:

"Laugh of the mountain! lyre of bird and tree!
Pomp of the meadow! mirror of the morn!
The sou