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beauty. Any lives that we know seem altogether unworthy of 
this great house of nature, “so royal-rich and wide,’ and what 
must we say of the lower forms that disgrace humanity itself, 
the deformities and horrors of towns? The Greeks people nature, 
the hills, and woods, and seas, and streams, with the beautiful 
creations of fancy, thereby indirectly acknowledging that the 
race of man was not worthy to dwell in so magnificent a man- 
sion. They had no literature or poetry of nature such as we 
have, but they would not thus have peopled it, if they had not 
felt how supremely beatiful it was. This tendency to people 
space with ideal forms ‘‘ the fair humanities of old religion,” is not 
confined to one race or to one period, it is the universal tendency 
of mankind. The beauty and loneliness of nature seem to suggest, 
seem almost to force from the imaginative mind this effluence of 
creative energy, aud in that way the desolate places of the earth 
have been made glad. Coleridge complains that these fair ideals 
‘‘live no longer in the faith of reason,” but they live in the 
imaginative mind, they belong to the soul of man, which pro- 
phesies in this way that the lonely places shall not always be 
lonely, and this magnificent abode shall yet have its fit inhabitant. 
“Life is mean,’”’ says Emerson, ‘‘ but how did we find out that 
itis mean?” Probably in more ways than one. But amongst 
others in one way certainly, by comparing the inhabitant with 
the house he inhabits. The figure is not worthy of the landscape. 
Who has not felt this? What poet of nature does not make us 
feel this? Walking on the dusty highway, on the market day, 
amidst the crowd of plodding wayfarers towards the setting sun, 
‘‘ Whose cloudy skirts, with brede etherial wove, 
O’er-hang his wavy bed,” 
have I not seen, plainly written upon every toil-writhen face, 
blindness to the great vision that shines for them in vain ? 
And yet it may be urged that it is hardly fair to the actual 
world, as we call it, to suggest these contrasts. For what is 
this nature of which we have these glimpses? It is itself an 
ideal, and not the real nature, the nature of science. In form- 
ing our ideals we make selections from the best or loveliest. 
The painter does not literally copy nature. He follows nature, 
but not as a slave. Nor does he always follow; in his highest 
moods he goes before, not only selecting, but suggesting and 
elevating. So Wordsworth says of the poet, he half perceives 
and half creates. And so the nature of which I am speaking is 
not every field in the township of Cliviger, or Habergham-Kaves, 
or Pendle Forest, or the Burnley valley. It is a summev’s after- 
noon at Holme, a few serene twilights in Towneley, a sunrise 
from this hill or a sunset from that; it is just a few ‘ local 
glimpses,’ gathered in the intervals of an anxious life preoccupied 
with sordid cares, and stored up in the still chambers of the soul. 
