Nature, give place to a realisation of Nature's being all the more terribly significant because the observer refuses to reconcile its conflict with his own personality either by material or immaterial unity; and while the associations of his childhood, youth, and age become consecrated as the earthly dress of an eternal being—not the melancholy entirety of one made of such stuff as dreams are made of—Wordsworth fears not to be materialised by the companionship of Nature, because he has neither deified her being at the expense of his own, nor denied her divinity in order to make himself eternal.
§ 99. When, therefore, we ask, as we have already asked, why it is that in the "mysteries" of Goethe and Byron deep feelings of personality, deep sympathies with Nature, strikingly contrast with the impersonal allegories and absence of Nature in the early drama of Modern Europe, we find our answer in the social and individual evolution of European life—in the expansion of social life, in the deepening of individuality winning new senses of sight and hearing, as it were, for the lights and shades, the murmuring inarticulate voices of Nature—
Dont les lieux déserts sont peuplés."
Social sympathies, individual consciousness, Nature's life, all on a scale of greatness never before approximated, seem to meet in a poet of that great Western Republic whose teeming population is indeed "not merely a nation, but a nation of nations." In America, says Walt Whitman, "there is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night;" in America, more than in the old countries of Europe, far more than in the stationary East, there is "action magnificently moving in vast masses;" in America, too, this largeness of Nature and the nation of nations "were
