This self-conscious communion of nature with her own heart, this questioning of her own being in contrast with man's being, this dim remembrance of herself elsewhere, hold in them a philosophic idea of nature we do not find elsewhere in the poets, and the philosophic imagination is charmed to play with it. It seems as if Arnold thought of the creative Logos, by whose being outward nature is and continues, as able to pass back momentarily from his existence in the natural world, which is subject to the conceptions of time and space, to a remembrance of the eternity when there was neither time nor space to him, when there was no material universe into which he had shaped the thoughts of God, when he was himself the Logos in God as yet unexpressed in form, but desiring eagerly towards form. This is Arnold playing with the obscure conceptions of Neoplatonism.
Again, he puts into two poems, the Youth of Nature and the Youth of Man, his contrast of the everlasting life of Nature with the decay and fleeting of our life. The beauty, charm, romance we feel in nature, are they, he asks, in nature or in the poet? In nature, he answers, and far more than in the poet; the singer is less than his theme. They were in the poet when he was conscious of the immeasurable glory of Nature's life. And what they were in him no pencil could ever paint, no verse could ever fully tell. The depth, the force, the joy, sadness, and longing of them which in youth he felt were nature's depth, force, joy, sadness,
