THE INNER LIFE. 
113 
Love is an odour breathing of Heaven; Hope sits beside 
us and points upwards lovingly, and the inheritance of 
life is a boon more sacred than the possession of a world, 
for it gives us more than a world—an Universe of 
beauty within ourselves. 
This is w r hy, in the first efforts of the anxious heart, 
that all books which set forth the harmonies of Nature 
are eagerly devoured. Every genuine student will re¬ 
in etriber when the most simple and unassuming books 
possessed inexpressible charms, if they but spoke in 
harmony with the poetry and moral sympathies which 
dwelt within his own breast; if they breathed of green 
fields and flowers, and sought to embody and embalm all 
that was beautiful in sentiment, and simple in thought. 
When we look back to our earliest readings in the great 
book of Nature, and our first communings with Nature’s 
worshippers, w r e seem carried to some sweet oasis in the 
dreary wilderness of life, where nothing but beauty, and 
the aspirations for a higher life could find a place. Then 
every book which had the least smell of green fields or 
water brooks, or was in any way imbued with the poetry 
of Nature, was devoured page by page, as if it were manna 
but just fallen from heaven. 
The high philosophy of beauty,, in which the ancients 
delighted, is a better symbol of the* manifestation of the 
sentiment than any which modern poets can afford. 
They said “ that the soul of man,, embodied here on 
earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other 
world of its own, out of wdiich it came into this, but was 
soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable 
to see any other objects but those of this world, which 
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