first spring. Silent as Lethe, dark almost as Styx, my stream now bears vessels on its breast to black wharves and high warehouses bordering it, and at the town quay meets and marries the Medina, an equal stream, which rose some eleven miles to the south, turned mills, flowed through meadows, and grew dark, and deep, and silent by the town wharves and stores, and yet had a less eventful history than its shorter-lived consort. The salt tide-wave here brings the married stream tidings of the sea, and helps it bear away the impurity of the town and carry the shipping to and fro, sadly at first, then more sadly, by a foul factory poisoning a sweet country for miles; and then joyously between sloping meadows and corn-fields, and more joyously by village spire and palace tower till, only five miles from the town where it met and married the Medina, my tiny stream floats majestic warships, and the finest pleasure fleet in the world, and, beneath the teeth of armoured forts, passes to the "Infinite main," in which it loses itself, as Kingsley's stream told him, "like a soul that has sinned and is pardoned again." But it has not disclosed its secret.

On the chalky downs on either side of the valley of its birth, there are grassy barrows, tombs of forgotten warriors of an extinct or outdriven race. These slain heard the sweet small voice in their day; Druids uttered weird incantations over its dimpling face, while it continued its pleasant warble untroubled. The Italian soldiers, who overcame those primitive Celts, saw their helmed heads and armoured bodies in its bright waters; they built part of yonder ruined castle; the remains of one of their villas, its floors of Roman mosaic, can still be seen on its brink. My little stream supplied the cups and baths of these civilised Southern people, but I fancy it kept its counsel under the gaze of their dark eyes. They named Pan Down and Mops Jovis (now Mount Joy), they were steeped in Greek myth; the little brook may have recalled Hylas and Narcissus, the hapless Arethusa and the pursuing Alphæus to their minds, with Syriux and the baffled Pan. Perhaps the Jutes, who came after them, fitted their Germanic nature-myths to it, and Christian converts of both races may have been baptised in its waters. That Wihtgar, who built and named the castle, the Wihtgarsburg, saw it and drank of it, perchance divined some of the mystery of its voice in the vale. That brave FitzOsborne, who built the church and enlarged the castle in the days of William the Norman, heard its pleasant song. Doubtless he, and the Jutes who came before him, reddened the water with human blood.

Many tongues have been spoken and strange gods worshipped by the side of my little brook; it saw all the pageant of the Middle Age pass it and fade down the centuries; to all those races and epochs it sang the same pleasant mystic song and ministered to similar necessities. When "bluff King Harry broke into the spence," and the Priory, still traceable by the church, was ruined, when Elizabeth built the newest gateway to the castle, when Charles pined behind its bars and looked out over the valley, hearing the brook's song in the night stillness, and when the French harried the islanders, burnt their towns, and were ambushed and slain by them, its lulling song was still the same, and will be the same when we, too, are dust. Yet the little dear brook is so young and so fresh in its fair perpetual infancy.

Of all brooks that laugh through the world, I surely love this little singing thing at the Clatter ford best, though many a brighter and better may be. Better even than that which "bickered down a valley," telling Tennyson so garrulously and charmingly and exactly of its doings and seemings without letting a hint of its inner self escape; better than Milton's "haunted stream" that so wrought on the fancies of young dreaming poets, or any of Shakespeare's, or that clear and cool river that told Kingsley its history, or Coleridge's hidden brook, which "to the sleeping woods all night, singeth a quiet tune."

Yet there is a brook more fascinating to me than this or any of these, the "sad little brook" that flowed through the secluded dell in the primæval American forest, where Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne met for the one brief hour of sunshine, that gladdend the morbid agony of their ruined lives. This sylvan brook, "in that wild heathen nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law or illumined by higher truth," is to my taste the most refreshing and beautiful, if not in literature yet surely in fiction. So bright, so restful, so soothing is that forest scene in contrast to the else intolerable agony and strain of what precedes and follows in that grand and gloomy romance. This little stream would not be comforted (by the singing child); it "still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened-or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen-within the verge of the dismal forest." In the rapture and relief of giving up the life-long struggle and parting with the symbol of an over-long and over-hard penance, "the course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy."

This is the pathetic fallacy pushed to its utmost limit, and the greatest imaginable contrast with that musical brook that

winds about and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.

Yet Tennyson too, sometimes, but chiefly in youth, falls into the pathetic fallacy, in spite of himself; for of reasoned purpose, and cn the whole, he is not subject to it and distinctly repudiates it, as in Break. Break. The mysterious and sorrow-laden brock, that in the heart of the great black “heathen" forest, reflects the child, happy in glowing sunlight, or angry in shadow, and parts her in her innocence from her guilty parents, until the Scarlet Letter, the sign of penance, is resumed, can never be forgotten, its charm and significance invite the imagination to return to it and to dwell and dream by it again and again. But the momentary brightness fades as Hester and Pearl fade into the forest twilight. "The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. Aud the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already over-burdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore."

The pathetic fallacy doubtless is a fallacy, but never was it more delightful or more convincing than in this fascinating forest scene, in which the water, the trees, the plants, and animals, the lights and shadows, all are moved from their own proper interests to take part in the human drama, of which they are the intensely sympathetic spectators. But there is infinitely more than the pathetic fallacy in the wild and deeply poetic nature, so magically touched by the hand of a great master of imaginative and spiritual art, and SO splendidly interwoven with human interest. There is a deep unavowed feeling of the dæmonic force of Nature, that indescribable sense of a living, breathing spirit permeating Nature, both as a whole and in parts, which constitutes the strongest charm and most irresistible magic of natural forces, scenes, and organisms, and which brings the human spirit into communion with another vaster and purer spirit, or host of spirits, of dark speech and mysteriously ennobling utterance. It is not pantheism, but is pantheistic, inasmuch as the divine spirit can speak

through gnomic nature as through the lips of a prophet; Hawthorne even goes so far as to talk of "illumining" the nature of the "heathen" forest by "higher truth," an extravagance which shows how intense is his half-conscious conviction of the dæmonic force, or spirituality of nature. His epithet "heathen" is a—to Wordsworthians-blasphemy against Nature, which may be traced from the Manicheeism and devil-worship, inseparable from the dark and dreadful creed of his Puritan forerunners. Whether most Celtic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian in its remotest origin, it were too long here to discuss; it is certainly neither Latin nor Gallic, ie., Latinised Celtic; probably not Greek: Greek nature personification is precise and clear-cut, while this derives its chief grandeur from its vagueness. But whatever else it may be, it is undoubtedly modern in its fullest development. Not the sensuous or æsthetic charm of Nature, but its super-sensuous or ethic charm, is its distinctive note; not the most beautiful, but the most suggestive and impressive, aspects of Nature are valued by this school, or rather church. It is at the root of mountain worship, a worship not so modern as is commonly supposed—for Dante knelt at this shrine, using another ritual than the modern. Shakespeare hints at the fellow creature in Nature; Milton has some inkling of it; Collins breathes it; but it flowers fully only in the poets of the present century. Even French poetry (of the romantic school) is touched by it; Lacaussade feels it supremely in l'Heure de midi, Paysage, and elsewhere; Leconte de Lisle has it in his Sommeil du condor, too long to cite, also Alfred de Vigny in le Cor:

Et la cascade unit dans une chute immense
Son éternelle plainte au chant de la romance :-

mountain waters speaking the same tongue as Hawthorne's forest brook. The Germans have it less than the English; Heine, that singular and unclassable spirit, has it markedly in the incomparable Die Lotosblume and Ein Fichtenbaum. His Prinzessin Ilse, like Lörelei, and like, in some degree, Shakespeare's fairies, is a modification of it, with some return to the primitive Germanic nature myths, such as Yggdrasil and the mystic river or serpent beneath it that girdles the world, such as those gnomes and local water and wood spirits, so like, yet so unlike their Greek kindred, Naiads, Dryads, Fauns, Satyrs, and Nereids. These Greek beings are sympathetic to Shelley's genius and that of Keats, though adopted and developed so differently and characteristically by those two poets. The greatest dæmonic Nature poets, except

Wordsworth-whose imagination is purely receptive and who is probably excepted because of his lack of creative power-are successful with these beings. Matthew Arnold, steeped in dæmonic Nature-lore, created a fresh and lovely variety in the exquisite Forsaken Merman. His far greater contemporary, Tennyson, has some sea-fairies, but they are lifeless and uninteresting. Coleridge has neither fairies nor Greek nature spirits, such as Shelley's Oceanides, and Keats' nature deities, nymphs and Lamias; the spirit "who bideth by himself, in the land of mist and snow," and the two embodied Voices, are original creations, beautiful and spiritual, though scarcely more beautiful, more spiritual, and more vital in their charm than the dæmonic unembodied Nature in the Ancient Mariner. Such, for instance, as "Still as a slave before

his lord, the ocean hath no blast," and the exquisite simplicity of

The moving moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide,

Softly she was going up

And a star or too beside.

That moon, whose "beams bemocked the sultry main," one feels, one scarcely knows how, has a great deal to tell, like Hawthorne's forest brook and Kingsley's stream, so much the more that it has a reticence wanting in the last too explicit current. The Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni is saturated with dæmonic force, e.g.: "Ye five wild torrents, fiercely glad." So, too, are other Sybilline Leaves, as Dejection and the fragmentary Hymn to the Earth. Yet Coleridge's Nature is not always accurate, as Tennyson's is. This super-sensuous feeling for Nature, though often called Wordsworthian, is no more peculiar to Wordsworth than Zolaism is to Zola; nay, Wordsworth is neither its founder nor its greatest exponent. Shelley is surely the high priest of that cult; mortal never penetrated so deeply into Nature's mysterious inner sanctuaries as he. Wordsworth is too much given to extract sermons from stones and books from running brooks, to catch the voice of the oracles, and except in those rare moods when he forgets himself, as a "consecrated spirit" set apart to be the sole authentic interpreter of Nature's mysteries, he is an exceptionally prosaic writer. And this not only in his moral and didactic metrical disquisitions, but in his purely Nature processes. "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees," is a bald statement of what occurs literally, though not perceptibly, even to the most exact scientific observer, and spiritually, poetically, and æsthetically, occurs not at all. It is as false