and without the human eye colourless, I 

 understand that what lies spread before me 

 never was until a human soul confronted 

 it and became its interpreter. This radiant 

 world upon which I look was without form 

 and void until the earliest man brought to 

 the vision of it that creative power within 

 himself which touched it with form and 

 colour and relations not its own. Nature 

 is as incomplete and helpless without man 

 as man would be without Nature. He 

 brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, 

 and clothed her with a garment woven on 

 we know not what looms of divine energy ; 

 and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened 

 him for the life which lay before him. To- 

 gether they have wrought from the first 

 hour, and civilisation, with all the circle 

 of its arts, is their joint handiwork. 



In the atmosphere of our rich modern 

 fellowship with Nature, the unwritten poetry 

 to which every open heart falls heir, we 

 forget our earliest dependence on the great 

 mother and the lessons she taught when 

 men gathered about her knee in the child- 



38 





