THE ART OF SEEING THINGS 



may be, the two combined, as they certainly were 

 in such a man as Tyndall. 



But nothing can take the place of love. Love is 

 the measure of life: only so far as we love do we 

 really live. The variety of our interests, the width 

 of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts 

 — if these do not measure our lives, what does ? 

 As the years go by, we are all of us more or less 

 subject to two dangers, the danger of petrifaction 

 and the danger of putrefaction; either that we shall 

 become hard and callous, crusted over with cus- 

 toms and conventions till no new ray of light or of 

 joy can reach us, or that we shall become lax and 

 disorganized, losing our grip upon the real and 

 vital sources of happiness and power. Now, there 

 is no preservative and antiseptic, nothing that keeps 

 one's heart young, like love, like sympathy, like 

 giving one's self with enthusiasm to some worthy 

 thing or cause. 



If I were to name the three most precious re- 

 sources of life, I should say books, friends, and 

 nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most 

 constant and always at hand, is nature. Nature 

 we have always with us, an inexhaustible store- 

 house of that which moves the heart, appeals to the 

 mind, and fires the imagination, — health to the 

 body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul. 

 To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, 

 laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of 



