thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

Most persons "do not see the sun; at least they have a very superficial seeing." We may add, that which the most thoughtful seer beholds —say in a star—is by no means the picture painted upon the retina of the eye. All that is there pictured is only a minute bright point. The gaslight far up a church steeple outshines the morning and the evening star, outshines Sirius and Orion. To the eye alone the lighted street of a city is brighter than all the galaxies. To the eye alone the illuminated dome of St. Peter's is more magnificent than the star-lit firmament. It is only when science comes in and tells us that these minute points of light are worlds, that man begins to see the starry heavens. What he then really sees is indeed not the stars themselves, but the stars as he has come to know them to be. The eye of your dog sees the same stars that your eye sees. Yet he never stops to gaze upon them, although he will go frantic at the blaze of an exploding fire-rocket. To him this is a phenomenon more imposing than any meteoric shower. And when science goes further, and tells of the immensity of space which separates us from the stars, we gain a still higher idea of their magnificence.

Yet to the mere eye this immensity of space is invisible. For aught the eye can tell us, the polestar is no farther off than the candle which shines from a cottage window on the top of a hill a few furlongs away; and that candle is to the physical eye by far the brighter of the two. And when science goes still further, and tells us that all the stars which we see, all those which the telescope reveals to us, and even those which the telescope refuses to distinguish separately, but gathers together into a faint cloud the accumulated light from untold myriads of them; and, still further, when it tells us that all these innumerable stars are but parts of one great system, bound together by one eternal and immutable law; that as the moon revolves around the earth, and the earth and all her sister planets around the sun, so all these starry suns are but satellites or sub-satellites of a still mightier sun, which mortal eye has never seen-when his intellect has fairly grasped these and such-like facts, and just so far as he has grasped them, then man begins to see the stars. But he sees them with the inward, not with the outward eye. To be a lover of Nature, a man must be an understander of Nature. Or, as Emerson phrases it, "The lover of Nature is he whose inward and outward senses are truly adjusted to each other. Then his intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of Nature a wild delight runs through

him, in spite of real sorrows." only apply such passages as this :

DELIGHT IN NATURE.

To such a one

"Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health the air is a cordial of incredible value. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.

"In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life-no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which Nature can not repair. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect on

me is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right."

Some of this is true to a certain extent of most men, perhaps at times to all men; and to none at all times. There is a certain mere physical delight in Nature even to the beasts. Some rejoice in sunlight and warmth; the Arctic bear delights in snow and ice. But to how many men is there ever anything which answers to this glowing description of the delights of Nature? Has the woodsman who sees in the tree at best only so much fuel or timber, or perhaps a thing to be got rid of so that he may plant his corn or potatoes, any such delight in the woods? Emerson is in no wise oblivious of the fact that all this does not belong wholly to Nature itself, but comes greatly out of our imminent relations to it. Thus he follows the foregoing by this pregnant limitation:

NATURE AND OUR MOODS.

"Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in Nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire; but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt

by him who has just lost a dear friend by death. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population."

That is, though the real aspect of Nature may not have changed, its aspect to us is but the counterpart of our own present mood. Does one wish to cast a gloom over the brightest summer day, he need only put on a pair of sad-colored glasses. As Coleridge has well said:

"We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live.
The rill is tuneless to his ear who feels
No harmony within; the south wind steals
As silent as unseen among the leaves.
Who hath no inward beauty none perceives,
Though all around is beautiful."

Passing from the material to the spiritual aspect of nature, Emerson proceeds to say that "whoever considers the final cause of the world will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes: Commodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline," and he treats of these uses in that order.

COMMODITY.

"Under the general name of 'Commodity' I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to Nature. This of course is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet, although