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I call it nature, but what it is I cannot tell. It is not the nature 
of science, it is an ideal I have gathered and helped to make. 
I do not know whether it would exist without the perceiving me. 
I think I do know that it would not so exist as it exists in me. 
The eyes of a cow or a horse looking over a field rest upon the 
same outward objects as mine do, I suppose, but does the cow 
see this nature that so entrances me? The man who meets or 
overtakes me on the road, and whose homely greeting is half 
query, half exclamation, ‘yo’re comin’ on! ’’—does he see it? 
He turns his eyes neither to this side nor that, never stops to 
look up at the soft colours and shadows upon the hill-side, or at 
the exquisite motion or stillness of the trees in the wood. As it 
was to Peter Bell, 
“The primrose by the river’s brim 
A yellow primrose is to him, 
And it is nothing more!” 
Is it at all probable that he sees the nature I see?” Could 
he see it and walk on as he does, ‘“ sullen-eyed and lifting never 
from the earth one conscious glance?’’ Well, if it is an ideal, 
is it fair to compare with it the actual men and women coming 
from market? They are not in it. They ave not ideal! They 
are in Cliviger and Pendle Forest, not in this Arcady of mine, 
which is a selection from all days and nights of the loveliest 
glimpses, caught at rare times and seasons and in rare moods, 
for forty years. But how then shall I get men and women to 
people this beautiful Arcadia ? How but as I get the Arcadia 
itself, by a selection from the loveliest and” noblest human 
beings. But these are hard to find, whereas this nature 
is not hard to find. I speak of my own experience. Such 
men and women as would be fit inhabitants for this select 
nature are very rare, very much rarer than the nature is, 
and the best hardly seem worthy of it. This fact then, 
if it be a fact, is the justification of the poet when he looks 
from his fair world of vision to the world of man, and finds 
in this way, by a comparison which seems forced upon him, 
that “life is mean.” This also is his justification when he 
peoples his glorious land with ideal forms, spirits, kindred of a 
higher race, not so much selected and idealised from actual life 
as from his dreams and his best books. This also is the reason 
why he makes nature a vestibule or portal to a world beyond, 
perfectly beautiful and whole, and not a lonely world like nature, 
nor peopled like the natural world with apes, and satyrs and 
men a little higher, and sometimes hardly a little higher, than 
these, but peopled—with what he cannot tell—it may be with 
an ideal, or shall I say a real? as much beyond his ideal as his 
ideal is beyond his actual experience. So does nature lead her 
worshippers on and becomes—a religion. And this is all done by 
a process of selection, or so it seems, if it matters how it is 
