6 “Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things”: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century

When the psychologist and experimental scientist George Henry Lewes wrote his six “Studies in Animal Life” for the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, ¹ he stipulated that they be prefaced with an epigraph from Wordsworth's poem “ The Excursion”:

Authentic tidings of invisible things; Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power, And central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation.