Nature answers with dying echoes, sinking in the midst of her splendour into a sad silence. Not so with human nature. The echoes of the word of truth gather volume and richness from every soul that re-echoes it to brother and sister souls. With poets the _fashion_ has been to contrast the stability and rejuvenescence of nature with the evanescence and unreturning decay of humanity:-- “Yet soon reviving plants and flowers, anew shall deck the plain; The woods shall hear the voice of Spring, and flourish green again. But man forsakes this earthly scene, ah! never to return: Shall any following Spring revive the ashes of the urn?” But our poet vindicates the eternal in humanity:-- “O Love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying; And answer, echoes, answer, Dying, dying, dying.” Is not this a new form to the thought--a form which makes us feel the truth of it afresh? And every new embodiment of a known truth must be a new and wider revelation. No man is capable of seeing for himself the whole of any truth: he needs it echoed back to him from every soul in the universe; and still its centre is hid in the Father of Lights. In so far, then, as either form or thought is new, we may grant the use of the word Creation, modified according to our previous definitions. This operation of the imagination in choosing, gathering, and vitally combining the material of a new revelation, may be well illustrated from a certain employment of the poetic faculty in which our greatest poets have delighted. Perceiving truth half hidden and half revealed in the slow speech and stammering tongue of men who have gone before them, they have taken up the unfinished form and completed it; they have, as it were, rescued the soul of meaning from its prison of uninformed crudity, where it sat like the Prince in the “Arabian Nights,” half man, half marble; they have set it free in its own form, in a shape, namely, which it could “through every part impress.” Shakespere’s keen eye suggested many such a rescue from the tomb--of a tale drearily told--a tale which no one now would read save for the glorified form in which he has re-embodied its true contents. And from Tennyson we can produce one specimen small enough for our use, which, a mere chip from the great marble re-embodying the old legend of Arthur’s death, may, like the hand of Achilles holding his spear in the crowded picture, “Stand for the whole to be imagined.” In the “History of Prince Arthur,” when Sir Bedivere returns after hiding Excalibur the first time, the king asks him what he has seen, and he answers-- “Sir, I saw nothing but waves and wind.” The second time, to the same question, he answers-- “Sir, I saw nothing but the water[1] wap, and the waves wan.”