OUTDOOR LIFE IN LITERATURE. 3 
the appeal of the outer world to the spiritual nature of 
man in the origin of the various forms of mythology. 
Every original expression of the devout feelings of man- 
kind is a worship of Nature. On the plains of India, 
in the Nile Valley, in Syria, Greece, Italy, in Scan- 
dinavia, in that strange volcanic isle, Iceland, among 
the canons of the Colorado River, and along the great 
plains of the West, under the Equator or the Arctic 
Circle, it has always been the same. The imagination, 
stimulated by close contact with those mighty and un- 
known forces of Nature, has endeavored to answer the 
“obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” 
and has peopled the earth and the air and the sea with 
myriad forms, beneficent or cruel. The worship of Isis 
and Osiris and the sacred animals has long since passed 
away from the Nile Valley, but the Parsee of the Iranian 
plateau and of western India still reverences, as his an- 
cestors did ages ago, the glorious sun and its mystic 
symbol, fire. And of all forms of worship not divine, 
this will seem the most rational. What fitter emblem 
of the Almighty than the sun, on whose beneficent 
supply of light and heat our life depends! The men of 
that elder day perceived this and fell down in adoration. 
So every race developed its own worship, colored by 
the influence of the differing aspects of Nature, here 
bright, there gloomy, borrowing ofttimes from its neigh- 
bors, sometimes imposing its own by relentless wars, 
