34 Walks in New England 



by the use they have made of the talents intrusted 

 to them. Here has a vast world of continually 

 reproducing beauty and glory been committed to 

 man s care, and he should be bound by the condi 

 tions of the gift to increase and glorify the work 

 of Nature. But instead, the line of the poet is 

 true : &quot; Man marks the earth with ruin.&quot; 



In this springtide, with every force of Nature, 

 that is, of God bent on the greater beauty, how 

 sluggish, how short-sighted, how injurious is our 

 custody of the treasures of beauty ! It is yet to 

 be discovered by mankind that there is nothing in 

 Nature which can be sacrificed without loss ; that 

 everything in Nature has value ; that not the least, 

 but the greatest value in the earth is its beauty. 

 It belongs and appeals to the spiritual part of 

 man, which will exist and find its fit place of 

 evolution or of devolution after this day, and will 

 be judged, saith the scripture, by the deeds done 

 in the body. 



Lo ! Easter comes ! and let us get quickly into 

 sympathy with that symbolic and noble coming, 

 in which God and Nature meet in one being, and 

 man is a part and an heir of both, that is to say, 

 of the selfsame begotten kinship, along with the 

 flower of the field, the bird of the air, the hyla of 

 the marsh, and the finest intelligence that sings 

 before the throne of God ! 



