82 
NATURE NOTES 
“ Oh ! let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest, 
and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and 
recreative study, can make the country anything better than 
altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive 
prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily 
sinned himself out of it.” 
But, unfortunately, so many screens interpose between us 
and Nature; between man and truth! The humours of the 
eye, the structure of the retina, the nerves, the brain, the air, 
dust, rain, the state of our digestion, of our health, of our 
circulation — in short, of our body, and still more of our mind. 
Heraclitus said that man could never bathe twice in the same 
river, nor can the river twice receive the same man. 
I know you will agree with me that the more that we study 
Nature, the more we enjoy it, the more we realise the beauty 
and interest, the complexity and perfection of the world in which 
we live. It is indeed astonishing that Rousseau can say in the 
Nouvelle Heloise “ II n’y a rien de beau, que ce qui n’est pas ” 
(There is nothing beautiful except what does not exist). Surely 
the opposite would be truer and more grateful. Some things 
are more beautiful than others, but all Nature is beautiful. 
God did not make some things beautiful, but all things beautiful. 
It is only Man who makes things ugly, even sometimes when 
copying what is beautiful. 
“All the purposes,” says Ruslan, “of good which we saw 
that the beauty of Nature would accomplish, may be better 
fulfilled by the meanest of His realities than by the brightest 
of imitations.” Stesichorus, in the old story, was deprived of 
eyesight because he did not appreciate the beauty of Nature. 
Reflections are, as a rule, more beautiful than the objects 
themselves; and the more we reflect the more beautiful the 
world will seem. 
W e cannot, I think, imagine any world more beautiful — any 
world, in Martineau’s words, “ more sanctifying than our own. 
There is none, so far as we can tell, under the more immediate 
touch of God ; and none whence sublimer deeps are open to 
adoration; none murmuring with the whisper of more thrilling 
affections or ennobled as the theatre of more glorious duties.”"' 
“ Broad indeed,” said the Emperor Akbar, “ is the carpet 
which God has spread, and beautiful the colours which he has 
given it.” 
“ L’Annee,” says Joubert, “ est une couronne qui se compose 
de fleurs, d’epis, de fruits et d’herbes seches.” 
In spring, “The swallows bring sunbeams on their wings 
from Africa to fill the fields with flowers.”t 
Some painters have been accused of decking Nature in too 
* Martineau. “ Kndcavours afler ihe Chiistian Lite.” 
tj cileries. 
