With poets the _fashion_ has been to contrast the stability and
rejuvenescence of nature with the evanescence and unreturning decay of
humanity:--

"Yet soon reviving plants and flowers, anew shall deck the plain;
The woods shall hear the voice of Spring, and flourish green again.
But man forsakes this earthly scene, ah! never to return:
Shall any following Spring revive the ashes of the urn?"

But our poet vindicates the eternal in humanity:--

"O Love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
And answer, echoes, answer, Dying, dying, dying."

Is not this a new form to the thought--a form which makes us feel the
truth of it afresh? And every new embodiment of a known truth must be a
new and wider revelation. No man is capable of seeing for himself the
whole of any truth: he needs it echoed back to him from every soul in
the universe; and still its centre is hid in the Father of Lights. In so
far, then, as either form or thought is new, we may grant the use of the
word Creation, modified according to our previous definitions.

This operation of the imagination in choosing, gathering, and vitally
combining the material of a new revelation, may be well illustrated from
a certain employment of the poetic faculty in which our greatest poets