' With regard to
the phrase itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of
Aylwin--the twenty-second edition--I made the following brief reply
to certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England
and on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The
Renascence of Wonder,'
Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man
which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties
of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of
Rossetti. The phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates
that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not
man only but the entire world of conscious life--the impulse of
acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all
the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to
confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of
my life has been the reading of _The Veiled Queen_, your
father's hook of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder
in the mind of man.
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