A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



Browning wrote volumes to express it, and when 

 he got through, he had simply said : &quot; All s well 

 in the world.&quot; But that is saying a great deal, 

 isn t it ? I am reminded just here that the late 

 Dr. James Martineau, after writing two monu 

 mental volumes of splendid metaphysics to es 

 tablish the reasonableness and the beauty of the 

 Nature of Things, put down this remarkable 

 acknowledgment in his preface : &quot; I am now 

 aware of the tediousness of these metaphysical 

 tribunals, especially when the whole process wins 

 at last, through all its dizzying circuits, only the 

 very position which common sense had assumed 

 at first.&quot; 



For the sensitive city man or woman, it would 

 be hard to find a more forbidding place than a dark 

 pool at night, shut in by thickets. He or she 

 brings to it some such fantastic horror as Poe 

 has furnished. It is a &quot; ghoul-haunted woodland 

 of Weir,&quot; just as soon as the sun leaves it. It 

 swarms with obscene things and dangerous. Its 

 water pockets are pitfalls, and in its recesses lurk 

 enemies that writhe if you touch them. But all 

 this disappears on acquaintance. Man for the 

 most part breeds these monsters in himself. It 

 is true such a place is haunted by all manner of 

 strange forms, but a man finds out sooner or 

 later that one and all of them are held to a 

 noblesse oblige that they never violate. Some kind 

 of statute ordains that they shall quietly and 

 politely give way to man, and even the tenacious 

 snapping-turtle that comes up from the mud of 



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