sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be
hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of
the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems
to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from
fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights
we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them
on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in
thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that
we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the
best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some
day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the
white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across
the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity
in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how
much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods.

Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed
in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as
we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that
has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies
opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound
thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to
gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives,
we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into
a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life,
whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at
large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to
scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American
traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural
spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense