Luckily we have not to answer this question in all its breadth and complexity; we are not now called to defend the truth of Poetry in its delineations of human character and emotions. Our subject confines us to that simpler aspect of the question which concerns the action of imagination on the external world. When the eye rests on the ranging landscape, and the heart responds to the beauty of it, the emotion which is evoked is as true and as rational as is the action of any law of Nature. This kindling of heart in the presence of Nature may be said to be “another aspect of reason.” It is not confined to any one order of men or stage of civilisation, but belongs alike to the child, the peasant, and the philosopher, if only the heart be natural and unspoiled. No doubt the imaginative frame of mind differs in each according to difference of mental habits, but in all alike it is essentially one. It is a spontaneous and unconscious acknowledgment of the beauty of the Universe—a proof to those who think about it that the Universe was made for the soul of man, and the soul for the Universe, that there is between them a wonderful harmony, the one answering to the other as the harp-strings to the hand of the musician. Take instances of this feeling, not from past times, but as it may exist in our own day. The Yarrow shepherd, as he goes forth at dawn and sees morning spread on the hills of the Forest, feels a momentary elevation of heart for which he has no words, and of which he may be but half-conscious; but in this feeling he has within him the first stirrings of that which, when the poet fashions it into fitting words, becomes an immortal song. His grandfather, a hundred years ago or less, when he saw the first streaks of dawn strike some lonely peak, or the early pencilings of light falling down into some hidden dell, embodied his feelings of that beauty in the imagination of Fairies retiring from their moonlight dances into the green knolls where they made their homes. The Ettrick Shepherd, in his childhood, was perhaps among the last who had a genuine feeling and belief of these symbols. They passed with him, but though the symbols have vanished the same appearances remain, and awaken the old feeling, and the feeling still needs a language.