32^ SIGNS AND SEASONS 



emotional process and their true value appears. 

 The diamond looks like a pebble until it is cut. 

 One goes to Nature only for hints and half truths. 

 Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them 

 or translated them. Then the ideal steals in and 

 lends a charm in spite of one. It is not so much 

 what we see as what the thing seen suggests. We 

 all see about the same ; to one it means much, to 

 another little. A fact that has passed through the 

 mind of man, like lime or iron that has passed 

 through his blood, has some quality or property 

 superadded or brought out that it did not possess 

 before. You may go to the fields and the woods, 

 and gather fruit that is ripe for the palate without 

 any aid of yours, but you cannot do this in science 

 or in art. Here truth must be disentangled and 

 interpreted, — must be made in the image of man. 

 Hence all good observation is more or less a refining 

 and transmuting process, and the secret is to know 

 the crude material when you see it. I think of 

 Wordsworth's lines: — 



" The mighty world 

 Of eye and ear, both what they half create, and what perceive; " 



which is as true ,in the case of the naturalist as of 

 the poet; both ''half create " the world they describe. 

 Darwin does something to his facts as well as Ten- 

 nyson to his. Before a fact can become poetry, it 

 must pass through the heart or the imagination of 

 the poet ; before it can become science, it must pass 

 through the understanding of the scientist. Or one 

 may say, it is with the thoughts and half thoughts 



