Aylwin | Page 2

Gelert's eager yelp! [_The dog swims swiftly away down the tide._]
Now, life and love and death swim out with him! If he should reach the smack, the men will guess The dog has left his master in distress. She taught him in these very waves to swim-- 'The prince of pups,' she said, 'for wind and limb'-- And now those lessons come to save--to bless.
ENVOY
(_The day after the rescue: Gelert and his master walking along the sand._)
'Twas in no glittering tourney's mimic strife,-- 'Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove, While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above, And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife-- 'Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife. Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove Conquered and found his foe a soul to love, Found friendship--Life's great second crown of life.
So I this morning love our North Sea more Because he fought me well, because these waves Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves That yawned above my head like conscious graves-- I love him as I never loved before.

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION
The heart-thought of this hook being the peculiar doctrine in Philip Aylwin's _Veiled Queen_, and the effect of it upon the fortunes of the hero and the other characters, the name 'The Renascence of Wonder' was the first that came to my mind when confronting the difficult question of finding a name for a book that is at once a love-story and an expression of a creed. But eventually I decided, and I think from the worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply the name of the hero.
The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed did not escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which she made in the Rivista d' Italia, gave great attention to its central idea: so did M. Maurice Muret, in the _Journal des D��bats_; so did M. Henri Jacottet in _La Semaine Litt��raire_. Mr. Baker, again, in his recently published work on fiction, described Aylwin as 'an imaginative romance of modern days, the moral idea of which is man's attitude in face of the unknown,' or, as the writer puts it, 'the renascence of wonder.' With regard to the phrase itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of Aylwin--the twenty-second edition--I made the following brief reply to certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England and on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The Renascence of Wonder,'
Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of Rossetti. The phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only but the entire world of conscious life--the impulse of acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of my life has been the reading of _The Veiled Queen_, your father's hook of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great picture symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin's vignette. Since the original writing of Aylwin, many years ago, I have enlarged upon its central idea in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in the introductory essay to the third volume of Chambers's _Cyclop?dia of English Literature_, and in other places. Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon the 'Renascence of Wonder in Religion.' I am tempted to quote some of his words:--
Amongst the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund, there is one of which part was already known to have occurred in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It runs as follows:--'Let not him that seeketh cease from his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have rest.'...We believe that Butler was one of the first to share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the renascence of religion....Men saw once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man's destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the lifelong