A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



warm ray stirred some flies and wasps out of ob 

 scurity into crawling and buzzing impertinence. 



For all I know, Nature may be a humourist 

 and have her Mark Twain moods. I dislike, 

 however, to think of her as a practical joker. It 

 invites the suspicion that one has been reading 

 Heine, and taken him seriously. And yet, when 

 Nature wrung the neck of the robin she had be 

 guiled, and ravaged the peach tree ruthlessly, scat 

 tering its confident blossoms and freezing its 

 misplaced sap with sardonic sport, I thought I 

 detected an Aristophanic laugh. 



Nature, I am forced to confess, is no laughing 

 matter to the man who dares to consider. (To 

 considerate is to look to the stars. To desiderate 

 is to want the earth.) I have a haunting recollec 

 tion that Goethe somewhere says that the severity 

 of Nature is an exact counterpart of the severity 

 of the Jewish Jehovah. But, whether he meant 

 that the Jews got their God out of the terrors of 

 the universe, or meant only that physical facts 

 corroborate what the Jews held to be revelation 

 I do not at this moment know. But this I know. 

 It will not do to come to the measurement of the 

 great scheme with one s sensibilities only. There 

 are some vast chasms in the universe, for which 

 our nerves have no plummets. They swim with 

 ignes fatui that oppress a Heine, but that, to the 

 brave vision of a Martineau or a Pressense^ open 

 like the milky way, and disclose worlds. 



As a rule, a man does not look askance at his 

 sensibilities till he passes his fortieth year, and then 



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