and her secret; but the question is whether the strokes in the German’s picture of nature {136} have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt’s touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare’s touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth’s in his cuckoo, Keats’s in his Autumn, Obermann’s in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms.  To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this question.

In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her.  But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now:  there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature.  In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.  In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry:-

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night —

to call up any number of instances.  Latin poetry supplies plenty of instances too; if we put this from Propertius’s Hylas:-

. . . manus heroum . . .  Mollia composita litora fronde togit —

side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:-

[Greek verse] —

we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and of the Greek way of handling nature.  But from our own poetry we may get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the conventional:  for instance, Keats’s:-

What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added.  German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe’s poems; the morning walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral