Clearly mythology and nature-poetry are closely allied though centuries come between: they breathe the same air though "creeds outworn" have yielded place to deeper faiths. And we are driven to ask--Is poetry in its turn to go?--poetry, at any rate, of the old, simple, direct sort? Reflective reason is asserting itself: critical methods play havoc with the spontaneous creations of imagination. Coleridge, in one of his moods, would almost persuade us so. In his "Piccolomini" Max is conversing with the Countess: "The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty and the majesty, That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason." And yet Coleridge did not allow that the outlook was wholly sad. His young soldier continues: "But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names." . . . and even at this day 'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, And Venus who brings everything that's fair." No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others-- critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness of experience--but behind each natural phenomenon is the immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness, which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust. The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic keenness of perception allied with feeling. "For Nature beats in perfect time And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. The wood is wiser far than thou; The wood and the wave each other know Not unrelated, unaffected, But to each thought and thing allied Is perfect Nature's every part, Rooted in the mighty heart." And again in his "Ode to Beauty," he rejoices in the "Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so."