224 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
professional entomologist or writer of books about 
moths would say of the passage I have quoted 
from a letter asking for information about an 
insect. Probably he would say that the lady wrote 
more from the heart than the head, that writing 
so she is rhapsodical and as inaccurate as one 
would expect her to be, although one is able to 
identify her Merrylee-dance-a-pole as the Macro- 
glossa stellatarum. 
It would be perfectly true—she is inaccurate, 
yet succeeds in producing the effect aimed at 
while the accurate writers fail. She succeeds 
because she saw the object as a child, emotionally, 
and after thirty years was still able to recover the 
precise feeling experienced then and to convey to 
another the image in her mind. We may say that 
impressions are vivid and live vividly in the mind, 
even to the end of life, in those alone in whom 
something that is of the child survives in the 
adult—the measureless delight in all this visible 
world, experienced every day by the millions of 
children happily born outside the city’s gates, but 
so rarely expressed in literature, as Traherne, let 
us say, expressed it; and, with the delight, the 
sense of wonder in all life, which is akin to, if not 
one with, the mythical faculty, and if experienced 
in a high degree is a sense of the supernatural in all 
natural things. We may say, in fact, that unless 
the soul goes out to meet what we see we do not see 
it; nothing do we see, not a beetle, not a blade of 
grass. 
