But The Feeling, Whether
Expressed Or Not, Was Always There.
Before the classic period we find
in Traherne a poetry which was distinctly animistic, with Christianity
grafted on it.
Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but
there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage
when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.
I must apologize to the reader for having gone beyond my last, since I
am not a student of literature, nor catholic in my literary tastes,
and on such subjects can only say just what I feel. And this is, that
the survival of the sense of mystery, or of the supernatural, in
nature, is to me in our poetic literature like that ingredient of a
salad which "animates the whole"; that the absence of that emotion has
made a great portion of the eighteenth century poetic literature
almost intolerable to me, so that I wish the little big man who
dominated his age (and till a few months ago still had in Mr.
Courthope one follower among us) had emigrated west when still young,
leaving _Windsor Forest_ as his only monument and sole and sufficient
title to immortality.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER
Mr. Trigg recalled - His successor - Father O'Keefe - His mild rule and
love of angling - My brother is assisted in his studies by the priest -
Happy fishing afternoons - The priest leaves us - How he had been
working out his own salvation - We run wild once more - My brother's
plan for a journal to be called _The Tin Box_ - Our imperious editor's
exactions - My little brother revolts - _The Tin Box_ smashed up - The
loss it was to me.
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