there written so legibly that even a poor creature like Rousseau, in laying down the sanctions for moral principles, was constrained to say: Rentrez dans votre cœur et vous les y trouveriez.

2. In order to find a sound basis for literary and artistic criticism, it will also be necessary, having placed ourselves, as it were, in the presence of Nature, to look into our own hearts for the object of our quest. Therefore, before attempting to lay down any definite critical principles, Î ask the student's close attention to some very interesting psychological manifestations which are of constant occurrence.

3. Exemplifications; a hedge by the roadside.Go along a country road on a spring morning. Look at the hedge on the roadside. You see a complex mass of stems and tangled twigs with buds opening and leaves expanding upon them. You can tell the scent, the shape, the taste, the colour of those buds and leaves. You will probably be able to say what kind of hedge it is: whether it is well or ill kept; whether it is suitable or not suitable for the place it occupies, and so forth. Indeed, a very ordinary and poorly endowed person may very easily be able to note all these facts regarding it-facts of kind, shape, quality, of sensation, and perception; but now notice another fact of your mental consciousness in presence of the hedge, another fact totally different in its kind from any I have yet mentioned-namely, a pleasurable emotion or feeling of delight (not a mere sensation, not a mere perception, nor any mere combination of such, but an actual consciousness of delight) arising from the contemplation of the object in front of you. Notice now particularly that this last mental manifestation or psychological result arising from the contemplation of the hedge is, in thought, quite

separable in its nature from the other psychological results. As a botanist, you may be concerned mainly about its kind, its parts, its habitat, its manner of growth, its general life-history; as a farmer, you may regard it from its qualities as a cattle fence; as a sportsman or a pedestrian desirous of striking a short passage to some place, you may be much concerned about its thorns in particular; but as a fairly well-endowed Man, whether sportsman, farmer, pedestrian, or botanist, you will, in addition to those interests, experience within your own consciousness that emotion of delight to which I have alluded. This and kindred emotions are the foundation of Esthetics, or the sense of the beautiful.1

4. The Primroses under it.-From the hedge itself cast your eyes downwards about the hedge roots. The primroses are in all their beauty. You may take cognizance of their shape, their scent, their number; you may relegate them in thought to the botanical genus or species to which they belong; you may consider them from the herbalist's point of view; but these same primroses, above and beyond the possibility or the probability of their giving rise to organic pleasure, or to a purely intellectual activity-these same

1 Which doctrine seems to harmonise exactly with that of Ruskin, who thus wrote in his Swiss Diary: "I had a hot march among the vines and between their dead stone walls; once or twice I flagged a little, and began to think it tiresome; then I put my mind into the scene, instead of suffering the body only to make report of it; and looked at it with the possession-taking grasp of the imagination-the true one; it gilded all the dead walls, and I felt a charm in every vine tendril that hung over them. It required an effort to maintain the feeling: it was poetry while it lasted, and I felt that it was only while under it that one could draw, or invent, or give glory to, any part of such a landscape. I have not insisted enough on this source of all great contemplative Art. The whole scene without it was but sticks and stones and steep dusty road.”—E. T. Cook, 'Life of Ruskin,' Vol. i. p. 246.

primroses will, almost of a certainty, give rise within the mind of the well-endowed spectator to an emotion of delicate spiritual delight. This for our present purpose is the main fact to be noticed from our association with primrose life, the fact upon which the poets build-perhaps in the following simple manner :

"The wee yellow primrose, sweet child o' the Spring,
Looks up to the sky when the lark's on the wing;
And keeks frae its grassy bower cosy and green,
And nods to the daisy, its bonnie wee frien'.

"It grows on the bank and it grows on the brae,
And blooms by the streamlet that sings on its way;
It shines on the grave where wee loved bairnies lie,
And mithers come there whiles to weep and to sigh.

"It grows near the palace and springs near the cot,
Its face is fu' bonnie, though lowly its lot;
It smiles to the rich and it smiles to the puir;
But dull prosy folk for its smiles dinna care.

"It shines like a star in the woodlands sae green,
And cheers lonely spots where it seldom is seen;
But saft breezes kiss it and over it play,

And wee linties sing till't, the lang summer day.

The silvery dews fa' on't on calm summer eves,
And dream a' the nicht on its pure silken leaves,
Such beauty its Maker the primrose has given,
O, surely an Angel cam' doon wi't frae Heaven."

5. The birds chirping and twittering in the hedges. -The birds, too, are darting about the hedges, chirping and twittering. They do not merely possess an ornithological interest. No mere treatise on sound, however able, is going to exhaust the interest of their chirping and twittering and warbling. The pleasure you receive from it does not end in the tickling of the auricular organ. comparative anatomist, nor physiologist, nor biologist, no combination of such, however able, can by any treatise exhaust the interest and the sig

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nificance of the birds' lives to the well-endowed man. Much great intellectual interest is doubtlessly to be found in the anatomy, the physiology, and the biology of the birds; but higher perhaps, and more sacred than all, there remains the esthetical interest. How delicate the delight, how sweet the emotions of freshness and freedom and gladness inspired by the spring warblings of the lark, the mavis, or the blackbird! This is esthetic fact and ground of poesy. Such emotions are

exquisitely expressed by Michael Bruce, for instance, in his "Ode to the Cuckoo"; by Burns in his addresses "To a Mouse" and "To a Daisy"; by Hogg, "To a Skylark"; by Shelley and Wordsworth on the same subject.

6. The azure Dome overhead.-Now look up into the azure Dome overhead. You experience a sensation of colour and a perception of widecanopied space. You may begin to speculate on the composition of the atmosphere, or, being mathematically disposed, you may find yourself trying to follow an imaginary perpendicular line up into the blue vault-straining, perhaps, to arrive in thought at some point which might necessarily terminate your imaginary straight line.1 In connection with this subject, there need be no end to the questions which might engage your intellectual energies. But those spacial, atmospherical, mathematical, or any other purely intellectual questions, do not exhaust the implications of the mighty Dome. Beyond, and, it may be, above them all, are the emotional activities inspired by the view, the emotions of gladness and freedom, of wonder or worship, or other

1 According to Professor Einstein and his disciples, we ought to be able to achieve this feat, which shows that they have not yet apprehended the nature of Necessary Truth and its implications. This subject is discussed in my 'Grammar of Philosophy,' chap. vi.

esthetical activity, corresponding to the character and mood of the beholder; high spiritual experiences, the authentic fact and substance of poesy.

7. A Mountain Top.-Or take your way up into a mountain. A geologist may furnish you with a very good hypothesis as to how the mountain came to be reared up. Turn your attention to the rent and torn crags. A physicist can immediately give you a very good and probably a true theory of the ways and means by which they were torn and rended. But the scientific or purely physical aspect of the case is far from exhausting the interest of those mighty crags. Your esthetic faculty is aroused. They raise within you a profound consciousness of loneliness, silence, desolation, majesty, awe, wonder, solemnity. If every crack and fissure visible in the riven peak could be scientifically explained, the esthetical implications and effects of the whole scene would remain to charm the emotional spectator as long as the peak endured. From such considerations it will appear how utterly silly is the notion which has gained some currency, that the advance of science will destroy poetry! 1 Or that there is any hostility or incompatibility between the claims of science and poetry at all. On the contrary, I submit that in all our poetry and fiction there should be a strong substratum of truth, of credible invention, and imaginative veracity.

8. The Seaside.-Now let us betake ourselves

1 Dr Dowden makes a mistake on the opposite side. Poetry, he declares, must be truer than History, or it has no right to exist." The French Revolution and English Literature,' p. 165. It will not do. But elsewhere he finely says, Shakespeare had become assured that the facts of the World are worthy to com. mand our highest ardour; that the more we penetrate into fact, the more will our nature be quickened, enriched, and exalted.”'Shakespeare: his Mind and Art,' p. 107.