Vanishing Roads and Other Essays | Page 3

of a nobler mystery.
But surely the Greeks were right, and we do but follow them as we
listen to the murmur of the wind in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of
the near presence of the divine.
The word by seers or sibyls told In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still
floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.
Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and
augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a
like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude,
we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as
they speed along their vanishing roads.
This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn
"pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of
course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror

of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal
affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods
with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but
we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of
correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the
very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts
into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into
ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue
simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we
cannot formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond
the reach of common doubt--a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one
might say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature,
and, therefore, of our own being as a part thereof.
In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that
those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time
moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and
that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us;
that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first
somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes
no less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him
form and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair.
It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has made
a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in the
same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or shaped
a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it said that
man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos or
grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his
humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is
probably the truth--that man has no feelings of his own that were not
Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but a
translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in
varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature
has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in colour
and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic
experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable

microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness
in the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years
that have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed
into him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face
of Wordsworth's maiden.
Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with
the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the
difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch
it put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass,
without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into
existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by
precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between
their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man
seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used
different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like
in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike too
in other and subtler ways, and that,