NATURE AND THE POETS. 127 



tome to be a convenient phrase, and about which the 

 Oxford professor of poetry has written a book, is, of 

 course, a myth, or is to be read the other way. It 

 is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is 

 nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. 

 Does the sculptor interpret the marble or his own 

 ideal ? Is the music in the instrument, or in the 

 soul of the performer ? Nature is a dead clod un- 

 til you have breathed upon it with your genius. You 

 commune with your own soul, not with woods or wa- 

 ters ; they furnish the conditions, and are what you 

 make them. Did Shelley interpret the song of the 

 skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale ? They in- 

 terpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick 

 of the poet is always to idealize nature to see it 

 subjectively. You cannot find what the poets find 

 in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the 

 woods. He sees Nature through a colored glass, sees 

 it truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, 

 the aureole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a 

 sunset, have no hidden meaning that the art of the 

 poet is to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret 

 them differently, and interpret them rightly, because 

 the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not Cole- 

 ridge's ; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's ; Emer- 

 son's humble-bee is not Lowell's ; nor does Turner 

 see in nature what Tintoretto does, nor Veronese what 

 Correggio does. Nature is all things to all men. 

 ^We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, 

 ' 4 the wonders we find without." The same idea is 



