A clever writer in the Popular Science Monthly some years ago endeavored to prove that here, as in other things, Darwin’s humility much exaggerated his defects, and that his natural poetical sympathy was greater than he recognized. This writer urges Darwin’s early enjoyment and his constant, apt, and accurate quotation to establish the thesis: ‘By his unconscious confession and the evidence of his written works, his mind was leavened with poetic feeling; all through his mature life he is ready with quotation when the occasion calls; and the very poignancy of his regret for the loss of poetry witnesses to his poetic endowment.’[200] But the contention though ingenious, is exaggerated. Darwin’s quick intelligence was interested in the substance of Shakespeare and Milton and other poets and prose writers. But it seems to me impossible that any one who had really felt the high stimulus of the splendor of Shakespeare’s imagination could ever have lost it to any such extent as Darwin deplores with obvious sincerity. Sainte-Beuve had as wide and varied a scientific curiosity as Darwin’s. But he said when he was well over fifty, ‘I rarely write about poetry, precisely because I have loved it so much and because I still love it more than anything else.’[201] Goethe’s old age was filled with scientific preoccupations, yet the glory of poetry was more to him than any possible science. III The most interesting point of all in connection with these æsthetic matters is that Darwin, for all his intimate contact with nature and all his scientific study, apparently did not feel much of the rapture and ecstasy that natural beauty affords to many who have often little or no scientific knowledge. Here, more than in any other field, there is of course a riot of convention and pretense, and thousands prate of clouds and sunsets and bird-song who have no more real feeling for these things than they have for any other form of æsthetic development. Nevertheless, the ecstasy has been recorded and rendered by too many persons whose gift of expression is as impressive as their sincerity is indisputable, to be neglected or overlooked. It is worth while to examine more closely into some of the elements of this imaginative enjoyment of the natural world. To begin with, there is the delight of simple perception, the excitement, the inexplicable thrill that goes with color and form and sound and movement, with the nodding of a blossom and the quiver of a butterfly, the ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ And no doubt this enjoyment is frequently too subtle, too delicate, too elusive, too evanescent to be put in words, and it comes to many who could never find the words to convey it. Something of its high intensity may be suggested by Cowper’s brief and poignant phrase: ‘O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a lovely prospect. My eyes drink the rivers as they flow.’[202]