Glossary of Literary Theory by Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown

Pathetic fallacy:

A term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects. Such ascriptions, he argues, "produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things." The term is also used nonpejoratively to denote a common feature of descriptive poetry; it is related to but somewhat less formal than the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia, or personification.