2^3 



Love, now an universal birth, 



From heart to heart is stealing, 

 From earth to man, from man to earth. 



It is the hour of feeling. 



It must be observed, however, that the perception of this 

 feature of the life of Nature — its semi-huraan characteristic — and 

 the intercommunion and reciprocity to which it gives rise, is not 

 possible at all times. It is only perceived when certain subjective 

 states of the percipient mind correspond with special objective 

 conditions in Nature itself. When these conditions are realised, 

 material forms seem but the raiment of a life beneath them, which 

 alone is real. As this life is not discerned by us equally in every 

 object, but only in some, so it is not apprehended every moment, 

 but only occasionally. If an apocalypse were constant, it would 

 be like the sunrise, and cease to be an apocalypse ; just as a 

 constant discernment of the underlying unity of things would 

 prevent us from recognising the diversity which plays npon the 

 surface. But when our faculties are at their keenest stretch, and 

 when our external conditions and surroundings are favourable — as, 

 when on the high hill tops, or under the clear vault of the sky on 

 a still and luminous night, or by the shore of the everlasting sea — 

 the veil is at its thinnest ; and the conviction is flashed upon us, 

 that the life of Nature is fundamentally kindred to our own. The 

 persuasion that Nature desires our fellowship is then no fancy, but 

 an intuition of the heart and the intellect and the esthetic sense 

 combined. For example, if you gaze into the heart of some 

 tenderly beautiful flower as it looks up from the moorland to the 

 sky, or listen to the sound of running waters on a far-off mountain 

 side, or watch the radiance of the clouds that gather round the 

 setting sun, does the sense of solitude deepen, or does the feeling 

 of a latent bond, and hidden social unity surviye ? Is the prevailing 

 thought that of the coldness, and silence, and unrecognisableness 

 of nature, or of its kindredness, its affinity, and its friendship? 

 Whatever it may be with the laivs of nature, — whether they do or 

 do not correspond, as Mr. Hinton put it, to the habits of a friend, 

 — the life of nature (of which the laws are the expression) is a 

 continual revelation of character; unfolding itself, now more clearly, 



