finable delicacy, charm, and perfection of
the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakespeare's
touch in his daffodil,[278] Wordsworth's in his cuckoo,[279] Keats's in
his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy
among the Swiss farms.[280] To decide where the gift for natural magic
originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must
decide this question.

In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are
here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic
imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all,
and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her.
But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the
conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of
handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the
magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on
the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling
nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the
Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added;
in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.
In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the
object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our
eighteenth-century poetry:--

"As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night--"[281]

to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of
instances too; if we put this from Propertius's _Hylas_:--

"... manus heroum ...
Mollia composita litora fronde tegit--"[282]

side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:--

[Greek: leimon gar sphin ekeito megas, stibadessin oneiar--][283]

we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and
of the Greek way of handling nature. But from our own poetry we may get
specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the
conventional: for instance, Keats's:--

"What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"[284]

is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed
with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added.
German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling
nature; an excellent example is to b