120 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
Let us remember that our poets, who speak 
not scientifically but in the language of passion, 
when they say that the sun rejoices in the sky and 
laughs at the storm; that the earth is glad with 
flowers in spring, and the autumn fields happy ; that 
the clouds frown and weep, and the wind sighs and 
‘utters something mournful on its way ’—that in 
all this they speak not in metaphor, as we are taught 
to say, but that in moments of excitement, when 
we revert to primitive conditions of mind, the earth 
and all nature is alive and intelligent, and feels as 
we feel. When, after a spell of dull weather, the 
sun unexpectedly shines out warm and brilliant, who 
has not felt in that first glad instant that all 
nature shared his conscious gladness? Or, in the 
first hours of a great bereavement, who has not 
experienced a feeling of wonder and even resentment 
at the sight of blue smiling skies and a sun-fiushed 
earth P 
“We have all,” says Vignoli, “ however unac- 
customed to give an account of our acts and func- 
tions, found ourselves in circumstances which pro- 
duced the momentary personification of natural 
objects. The sight of some extraordinary pheno- 
menon produces a vague sense of someone acting 
with a given purpose.” Not assuredly of ‘‘ some- 
one” outside of and above the natural phenomenon, 
but in and one with it, just as the act of a man 
proceeds from him, and is the man. 
It is doubtless true that we are animistic to this 
extent only at rare moments, and in exceptional cir- 
