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. 



