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wonder at all that dawns upon it ; imagination takes the place of 

 certainty of knowledge, and fills the unknown with mental crea- 

 tions. Poetry occupies the place of prosaic fact, for poetical 

 expression is the natural language of emotion, and there is 

 nothing that excites the emotions of the mind as do the beautiful 

 and awe-inspiring works of Nature. 



Said a little fairy four-year-old to me the other day, pointing 

 to a radiant cloud, " Is that where the sunshine lives ? " A story 

 is told of a little negro girl who thought that " the stars were 

 gimblet holes in the floor of heaven to let the glory through." 

 Natural, spontaneous poetry this ; not perhaps of the exquisite 

 finish of Shakespeare's : — 



" Look how the floor of heaven 

 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ; " 



but nevertheless equally the language of the emotion of the 

 mind. 



The child to-day imagines the copse at the bounds of the 

 home-garden to be inhabited by wood-sprites ; and the field half- 

 a-mile away to be peopled by fairies and elves, and a cave is 

 always an abode of awful mystery. 



A fuller knowledge, when it comes, will disillusionize the 

 child, will dispel the childish fantasy and replace it with solid 

 fact, and, perhaps, — not a little disappointment. 



What the child is, such are nations in their infancy ; and, 

 like the child, they have their growth in knowledge and their 

 disillusioning. Pascal in his "Pensees" says: — "The whole 

 human race in its development through a long series of ages 

 must be regarded but as a man who lives perpetually and learns 

 continually." 



In the beginnings of nations, the forces and aspects of 

 Nature so little understood, or rather so much misunderstood, 

 offered nothing but a field for imagination. Peering into the 

 unknown they peopled the world with fancy ; phenomena for which 

 the undeveloped mind could offer no natural explanation, were 

 regarded as the outcome of occult agencies or the handiwork of 

 superhuman beings. Their superstitions had as a root a belief 

 in Animism by which the savage saw life in every object, animate 

 or inanimate as the child sees life in the doll with which it plays. 

 Animals, and even stocks and stones, were supposed to have 

 souls, and why should they not have some mysterious power of 

 helping or of hurting him ? And thus the idea gradually grew 

 of the advisability of propitiating the unseen by worship and 

 sacrifice. 



' ' From such rude beginnings we see nations as they advance 

 in civilization rising to higher conceptions, developing the ghosts 

 into gods and confining their operations to the greater phenomena 

 of Nature, such as the sky, the earth, the sea, the sun, the stars, 

 storms, thunder, and the like. And by degrees the unity of 



