Now the thought here expressed, false if taken as an adequate explanation of our whole attitude towards Nature, is eminently true of certain moods of mind when we are under strong excitement. It is not true that Nature is a blank or an unintelligible scroll, with no meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of our own transient feelings. But it is most true that we are often so absorbed in our own inward moods that we cannot for the time see anything in the outward world but that which our eye, colored by the emotion, sends into it. On this subject Mr. Ruskin discourses eloquently and subtly in a chapter in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” to which I would refer those interested in these matters. He calls the tendency to make Nature sympathize with our own present feelings “The Pathetic Fallacy.” His view of the matter is this: “that the temperament which is subject to the Pathetic Fallacy is that of a mind and body overborne by feeling, and too weak (for the time) to deal fully and truthfully with what is before them or upon them.” He points out that “this state is more or less noble according to the force and elevation of the emotion which has caused it; but at its best, if the poet is so overpowered as to color his descriptions by it, then it is morbid and a sign of weakness. For the emotions have vanquished the intellect.” It is, he says, “a higher order of mind, in which the intellect rises and asserts itself along with the utmost tension of passion, and when the whole man can stand in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his weight.” Mr. Ruskin further says (p. 164), “There are four classes of men—the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly. [He might rather have said, and therefore see nothing.] The men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets). The men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets). And the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them.” This last he calls “the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.”