JUNE 141 



to a glinting blue that approached her. " Pee-oi," shouted 

 the peacock, now close at hand; " pee-oi . . . pee-oi," as 

 he passed her by, and turning, she also shouted " pee-oi," 

 frightening the cuckoo from the beeches, as she ran back 

 among the flowers to the house. 



What is to come of our Nature-teaching in schools? 

 What does it aim at? Whence does it arise? In part, 

 no doubt, it is due to our desire to implant information. 

 It is all very well for the poet to laugh — 



When Science has discovered something more 

 We shall be happier than we were before ; 



but that is the road we are on at a high rate of speed. 

 If we are fortunate we shall complete our inventory of 

 the contents of heaven and earth by the time when the 

 last man or woman wearing the last pair of spectacles 

 has decided that, after all, it is a very good world and one 

 which it is quite possible to live in. That, however, is an 

 end which would not in itself be a sufficient inducement 

 to push on towards it; still less can such a vision have set 

 us upon the road. 



Three things, perhaps, have more particularly per- 

 suaded us to pay our fare and mount for somewhere — 

 three things which are really not to be sharply distin- 

 guished, though it is convenient to consider them separ- 

 ately. First, the literary and philosophical movement 

 imperfectly described as the romantic revival and return 

 to Nature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

 Poets and philosophers need private incomes. State por- 

 ridge and what not, but literature and philosophy is a 

 force, and for a century it has followed a course which 

 was entered in the period of the French Revolution. 

 This literature shows man in something like his true 



