Such sensuous enjoyment of Nature, quickened by imagination, but unbalanced by deeper qualities, has led more than one, and especially in our own day, to an attempted revival of vanished Paganism, which, if made the key-note of any Poetry, is destructive of true manliness and of the highest human worth. By such a sensuous temperament, the forms and colors and fragrancies of the outward world may be deliciously enjoyed and vividly rendered. But this is all. The deeper tones that lie in the silences of Nature will be all inaudible, unless the ear be overhearing at the same time the deep music of the heart. For the soul to apprehend all that Nature contains of meaning, there must be present not only the eye keenly observing, and tenderly sensitive to natural beauty, but behind this must be a heart feelingly alive to all that is most affecting in human life, sentiment, and destiny. And not only this, but in all survey of created things the upward look, unexpressed it may be, yet ever present, toward the Uncreated. It cannot but affect even the poet’s feeling about the most common material things, what may be his regards toward that Unseen Presence on which, not Nature only, but the spirit of man reposes. As he looks on the face of earth, sea, and sky, the thought, whence come these things, whither tend they, what is their origin and their end, must habitually enter in and color that which the eye beholds. It can hardly be but that a man’s inner thoughts about these things will find their way out and color the observation of his eye. Even the ethereal beauty of Shelley’s descriptions—his perception of the motion of clouds and shadows and sunbeams—his delight in all skyey and evanescent things too delicate for grosser eyes,—you cannot read them long without being crossed by some breath blown from his own distempered moral atmosphere. The “sky-cleaving” crags suggest to him heaven-defying minds, and his mountains have a voice “to repeal large codes of fraud and woe.” Byron,—though his later poetry contains noble passages on mountain scenery, even the high Alps are hardly strong enough to lure him into temporary forgetfulness of his own unhappy self, and his quarrel with mankind. In fact, so closely and deeply united are all the parts of the universe, that no one can apprehend the full compass of its manifold harmonies, whose own heart is not filled with that central harmony which sets it right with God and man. CHAPTER III. POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC WONDER. But same one may ask, Is not imagination generally at war with reason and truth? Is not the quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy as old as the days of Plato? Did not he feel this so keenly that he banished poets as false teachers from his well-ordered State?