objects with sentient individual lives; our more advanced intelligence conceives of a universal spirit that comprehends and soothes Earth's children. In our own youth, nature haunts us "like a passion;" and as concerning the youth of a race we "cannot paint what then "we were, in mature years each of us can say,
"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
This has never been expressed so well as in Wordsworth's elevated phrases. They must always be cited. But a disenchantment is at last Expressions of the old feeling and the new doubt.upon us, and we are sternly questioning our reason. Is not nature's apparent sympathy, we ask, a purely subjective illusion? The old belief, the new doubt, are well conveyed in the early and later treatment of a favorite theme,—the moaning of a sea-shell held to the ear. In Landor's "Gebir" we have it thus:—
The shell's murmur, as idealized by Landor and Wordsworth.
"But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue;
········
Shake one and it awakens, then apply
Its polished lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there."
