reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart
instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any
violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same
feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish
violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather
than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its
shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but
wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her
incense through the woodlands.

After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of
natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all
the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and
manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection
of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the
strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically
celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter,
and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first
strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like
return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not
where--the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the
window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed,
bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the
door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all
the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos
along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a
lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious
service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in
very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth
knowledge."