recognized, to keep alive the sense of among his fellow-men, and to interpret to them, as best he may, those enduring yet tender intimacies that exist between their hearts and the wide world of eye and ear that surrounds him. This mighty process of influencing man, not only through his corporeal needs, but in the more delicate recesses of the heart, the outward world, it is clear, must have been carrying on unremittingly since the earliest appearance of man on the earth. But what may have been the phases of it in primeval times, before history finds man, is a question I do not propose to enter on. No doubt, even in the most remote eras, when savage men dwelt naked in caves, or cowered in abject worship before the blind forces of Nature, and lived in terror of wild beasts, or of each other, even then there must have been moments when their hearts were imaginatively touched, as either the hurricane or the thunder awed them, or Nature looked on them more benignly through the sunset or the dawn. In that later stage, when the Aryan family had reached their mythologizing era, and owing to the weakness of their abstracting powers and the strength of untutored imagination, were weaving the appearances of earth and sky into their hierarchies of gods, Nature and Imagination were face to face, and were all in all. The other intellectual powers of man were as yet comparatively dormant. He had not yet learned consciously to disengage the thoughts of himself and of God from the visible appearances in which they were still entangled. But to trace the movements of Imagination through that primeval time forms no part of my present task. Even without attempting this, there is more than enough to detain our thoughts, if we attempt to trace, even in outline, some of the ways in which the human and poetic imagination has worked on the outward world in that later stage when the three great entities, God, Man, and Nature, were in thought clearly distinguished. Though in studying our present subject it may be necessary for clearness’s sake, in some measure to isolate Nature in thought from the other two great objects of contemplation, with which in reality it is so closely interwoven, we must never conceive of it as if it were really a separate and independent existence. However we may for a moment regard Nature by herself, we must not forget that in reality we can never contemplate it apart from the other two entities on which it depends; that Nature as mere isolated appearance, without a mind to contemplate and a power to support it, is meaningless; that all the three objects of knowledge coexist at every moment, interpenetrate and modify each other at every turn of thought; and that it is to the light reflected on Nature from the other two that she owes large part of her meaning, her tenderness, her suggestiveness, her sublimity.