318 THE BIRD WATCHER 
Other nobly optimistic lines slide into the memory, 
sunlight passes fot desolate landscape, and the 
discomforting words, almost as they are uttered, are 
atoned for by the comforting personality of the poet 
who penned them. Thus nature, passing through 
the lips of man, is tempered and dulcified in the 
passage. 
But supposing that such lines as the ones quoted, 
because their source is unknown to the hearer, can 
have no such comfort annexed to them, or supposing 
that the poet does not trust, but is a gloomy pessimist, 
or, which is more to the point, that instead of lines, 
with their music and generalisation, we have an actual 
horrid description, merely, of an actual horrid thing, 
all in the plainest prose, from some one whose per- 
sonality we neither know, nor is worth the knowing— 
I have supplied an example—-what softening influence 
is there here? Is not this but one degree better, in 
the sense I mean, than seeing the horror itself? I 
believe that here, too, the difference is of kind, and 
that a consolation is extracted which we cannot extract 
when brought face to face with nature herself, because 
the truth, then, is too overwhelming. The comfort, 
in such cases, comes not through the mind of the in- 
dividual who is telling us, but through the general 
mind of which his is but a part, through the human 
ocean, rather than the human drop in it. For their 
own comfort, as I believe—in self-defence, to exclude 
misery—the great mass of mankind are optimistic, 
nor can any unit of the mass impart, or suggest, to 
