The animism which persists in the adult in these scientific times has
been so much acted on and changed by dry light that it is scarcely
recognizable in what is somewhat loosely or vaguely called a "feeling
for nature": it has become intertwined with the aesthetic feeling and
may be traced in a good deal of our poetic literature, particularly
from the time of the first appearance of _Lyrical Ballads_, which
put an end to the eighteenth-century poetic convention and made the
poet free to express what he really felt. But the feeling, whether
expressed or not, was always there. Before the classic period we find
in Traherne a poetry which was distinctly animistic, with Christianity
grafted on it. Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but
there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage
when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.
I must apologize to the reader for having gone beyond my last, since I
am not a student of literature, nor catholic in my literary tastes,
and on such subjects can only say just what I feel. And this is, that
the survival of the sense of mystery, or of the supernatural, in
nature, is to me in our poetic literature like that ingredient of a
salad which "animates the whole"; that the absence of that emotion has
made a great portion of the eighteenth century poetic literature
almost intolerable to me, so that I wish the little big man who
dominated his age (and till a few months ago still had in Mr.
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