NATURE AND THE POETS 113 



and in these lines of Lowell : — 



" What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, 

 Is but our own conceit of what we see, 

 Our own reaction upon what we feel." 



" I find my own complexion everywhere." 

 Before either, Coleridge had said : — 



" We receive but what we give, 

 And in our life alone dotli Nature live; 

 Ours is the wedding-garment, ours the shroud;" 



and Wordsworth had spoken of 



" The light that never was on sea or land, 

 The consecration and the poet's dream." 



That light that never was on sea or land is what 

 the poet gives us, and is what we mean by the 

 poetic interpretation of nature. The Oxford pro- 

 fessor struggles against this view. "It is not true," 

 he says, " that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible 

 scroll with no meaning of its own hut that which 

 we put into it from the light of our own transient 

 feelings." Not a blank, certainly, to the scientist, 

 but full of definite meanings and laws, and a store- 

 house of powers and economies ; but to the poet the 

 meaning is what he pleases to make it, what it pro- 

 vokes in his own soul. To the man of science it 

 is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet 

 touches and goes, and uses nature as a garment 

 which he puts off and on. Hence the scientific 

 reading or interpretation of nature is the only real 

 one. Says the Soothsayer in "Antony and Cleo- 

 patra : " — 



"In Nature's infinite book of secresy a little do I read." 



