a feeling which, at the intensest, is incommunicable and unspoken. The reader will ask why there is so little here from Tennyson, from Browning, from Clough, William Morris, and Swinburne. Heard they none of these voices? Had they, unlike all other poets, no adoration for the simplicity, the purity, the divinity of Nature? The question needs no answer. But this was seldom their selected theme. The most splendid part of their poetry was inspired pre-eminently by the complex drama of human life-the drama of conduct, of heroism, of passion, or, as in the case of Clough, the drama of thought. It is in poems of happy contemplation and placid reverie, and in the idyll, that we look for the deliberate expression of this homelier and purer feeling. Yet, perhaps, the most moving statement in English literature of this simple faith are the words of one who lived no such life himself, and whose voice is laden with an infinite burden of sadness and regret. Immersed and buffeted in the complex currents of our modern life, Matthew Arnold in The Scholar Gipsy declares his longing for the peace that Nature gives, the innocent trust of an age that knew not the delirium of emancipation and doubt and progress. It would be a mistake to generalise too far, and say that our later English literature never touches on this theme analytically and didactically. Minor poets like Southey and Eliza Cook will be found to have indited their moralising lessons in the same neat rhymes as their predecessors in the two centuries before. And the American writers who are quoted fall naturally into a distinct group by reason of this very propensity. In the devout Bryant, the didactic Whittier, the transcendental Emerson, the philosophic Thoreau, and again in the reflective essays of our contemporary John Burroughs—all of whom owe as much to the prose philosophers as to their common ancestor Wordsworth—we find Nature-worship enunciated most clearly and definitely as a creed. The Editor offers his hearty thanks to the following for granting him permission to include selections from the works mentioned: Messrs. Macmillan and Co. (Barnes's Poems of Rural Life), Mr. Horatio F. Brown (Lebens Philosophie, by J. A. Symonds), Messrs. Wm. Blackwood and Sons (two excerpts from George Eliot), Messrs. Duckworth and Co. (The Grey Brethren, by Michael Fairless), Mrs. Romanes (Simple Nature, by the late G. J. Romanes), Mr. Elkin Mathews (Poems, by W. Bell Scott), Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co. (The Gamekeeper at Home, by Richard Jefferies), and Messrs. George Allen and Sons (Cory's Ionica). The following authors have also generously allowed extracts to be made from their works: Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. John Burroughs, Mr. Edward Carpenter, the late Sir Lewis Morris, and Mr. Samuel Waddington; and the Editor is deeply grateful to them. He regrets that for reasons of copyright it was not permissible to include more than one short piece from Ruskin—a serious omission-anything from Christina Rossetti or Stevenson, and-worst of all -anything from Mr. Meredith. None has expressed so nobly or so clearly, either in verse or prose, as our greatest living novelist what one might almost call this modern theology of the simple, natural life, this truth that 'through Nature only can we ascend'. Earth your haven, Earth your helm, |