140 A Walk from 



unwool it below ; to horn or unborn tbe bead, to 

 blacken or blancb tbe face, to put on tbe whole body 

 a new dress and make it and its remote posterity wear 

 this new form and costume forever more. All this 

 shows how kindly and almost proudly Nature takes 

 Art into partnership with her in these new structures 

 of beauty and perfection ; both teaching and taught, 

 and wooing man to work with her, and walk with her, 

 and talk with her within the domain of creative ener- 

 gies ; to make the cattle and sheep of ten thousand 

 bills and valleys thank the Lord, out of the grateful 

 speech of their large, lustrous eyes, for better forms 

 and features, and faculties of comfort than their early 

 predecessors were born to. 



Equally wonderful, perhaps more beautiful, is the 

 joint work of Nature and Art on the sweet life and 

 glory of flowers. However many they were, and what 

 they were, that breathed upon the first spring or sum- 

 mer day of time, each was a half-sealed gift of (rod to 

 man, to be opened by his hand when his mind should 

 open to a new sense of beauty and perfection. Flowers, 

 each with a genealogy reaching unbroken through the 

 Flood back to the overhanging blossoms of Eden, have 

 come down to us, as it were, only in their travelling 

 costume, with their best dresses packed away in stamen, 

 or petal, or private seedcase, to be brought out at the 



