"[72]
The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth and
tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insuperable. But
of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen, exactly in
so far as something appears to her to be in nature which is not. The
flowers do not really reproach her. God meant them to comfort her, not
to taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.
Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring emotion.
There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She
reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the singing of
the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in
heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought.
"As if," she says,--"I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does
verily seem as if." The reader will find, by examining the rest of the
poem, that Ellen's character is throughout consistent in this clear
though passionate strength.[73]
It then being, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects
that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic,
feeble so far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion
of Truth is entire, over this, as over every other natural and just
state of the human mind, we may go on to the subject for the dealing
with which this prefatory inquiry became necessary; and why necessary,
we shall see forthwith.
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