object, is just the region of all the things which can be objects of representative reproduction. The only thing that need be added is that by nature we mean, for aesthetic purposes, the fulness of the soul or semblance of external things, that which imaginative perception freely apprehends, and remodels in the interest of feeling. There is no reason to cut down our meaning to the attenuated constructions of physical science. They are not nature as it appears, and nature as it appears is what we love and admire. It is the living external world, as we relive it in our fullest imaginative experience.
It is well known that this, in its fulness, is a point of view which takes time to develop. “The charm of Nature,” I believe, in the modern sense, is first mentioned by an Alexandrine poet of about the third century A.D. “In the house you have rest; out-of-doors the charm of nature.”[1]
And as we saw, though this imaginative
- ↑ Mackail, Select Epigrams, p. 278.
