The poet may thus throw the plank for us where the psychologist or metaphysician fails. He 'sees into the life of things.' His insight, which comes and goes in flashes marvellous but fugitive, which dart across the world and bring back this report of correspondence, illumines every realm of nature. He tells us that it is 'haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind.' He finds the whole temple of nature exquisitely filled with symbols of his own deepest thought. She is a storehouse of imagery expressing the subtlest gradations of his feeling. Wherever he moves he finds that the forms and the forces around him are an interpretation of what he _is_. They are the symbolic language of his deepest thoughts and highest aspirations, while his innermost life again interprets them. He explains the inner world in terms of the outer, and the outward in terms of the inward. In the grand vocation of the poet, we know of nothing grander than his function to mediate between the baffled ontologist and the man of science. He is a reconciler who presents a common truth which those on either side may recognise, and the recognition of which may draw them together. This vast and varied region of our complex nature, the æsthetic or poetic, thus comes to the aid of our theology. The great imaginative poets, in their delineations of man and nature, do not idealise; they _see_: or they see before they idealise. Who will affirm that Wordsworth's 'inward eye'--by the use and cultivation of which he became the greatest of all interpreters of the symbolism of nature--in seeing visions, saw but the ghostly forms of his own imagination, and was not in contact with _real existence_? Are his 'spiritual presences' as unreal as the fawns and dryads of polytheistic legend? And was not even the early personification of nature a cruder testimony in the same direction,--the belief in these deities of the wood and hill and stream being a dumb homage by the savage mind to a divinity in nature kindred to man? Is the poet, then, _a seer_,[19] or only the elaborator of fancies?--the mere creator of ideal shapes, or the discerner of real existence? He tells us that nature is a luminous veil, behind which visions are to be seen, and voices heard; that sometimes, in a moment, he has come upon the footprints of the supernatural; and that, in such moments, he is in contact with a reality, which he calls 'the soul of the world.' Why should he call it a _soul_, if he has no intuition of its analogy and correspondence with his own nature? And what though he speaks continually in the plural, and tells us of the myriad 'presences,' as the scientific explorer speaks of manifold 'forces?' What though he lapses into a semipolytheist interpretation of nature? It is but the sign of a weight of inspiration too vast for one utterance. It indicates that his feeling of the central life has broken up the diversity; that nature's great soul--_the_ Presence--cannot reveal itself at once as