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Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! : Helps for Girls, in School and Out by Annie H Ryder
page 24 of 126 (19%)
stretches of sublimity in order to appreciate her. You will come to
know her far more easily, and much more helpfully, in a little woodside
walk, or right here underneath these branches, than you will in Niagara
Falls, or in looking at her in the great ocean. She comes down more
to the level of your understanding here in this meadow. Comes down
to your comprehension? Yes; I mean that, and yet I would not for a
moment imply that in her most commonplace guise you can exhaust her
beauty. Do you know what Mr. Ruskin says about such an apparently
insignificant thing as a blade of grass? "Gather a single blade of
grass, and examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow, sword-shaped
strip of fluted green. Nothing it seems there, of notable goodness
or beauty. A very little strength and a very little tallness, and a
few delicate long lines meeting in a point.... And yet, think of it
well, and judge whether of all the gorgeous flowers that beam in summer
air, and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to the eyes and good
for food,--stately palm and pine, strong ash and oak, scented citron,
burdened vine,--there be any so deeply loved, by God so highly graced,
as that narrow point of feeble green."

But _how_ to get acquainted with Nature is the question. By
observation,--by simply opening your eyes and seeing. If no one yet
knows all about a blade of grass, surely no one has so far beheld all
the beauty there is in a single sun-rise. You cannot see every thing
at a glance. When you first let your eyes rest upon the horizon, you
may see only a piece of sky in the east: not very remarkable, you think,
except that here and there are things that look like streaks of red
and yellow. Later, you find something unobserved before,--clouds shaped
like islands and balanced in mid-air, or lying like rafts which float
along the edge of the sky. Then the color seems to deepen, and to spread
out in great bars of light which lift and remove the remnants of the
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