clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree,
alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the
thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like
stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him
before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of
Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say,
a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as
apple-blossom of the apple?

If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation
of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her
varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation
through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe.
The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid
pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike
dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only
come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all
things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the
sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or
whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself
in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places,
dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs
its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass.

As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so
endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest
moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as
though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the
universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of
rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the