Arnold Haultain

“ Even if your courtship be sincere, it must be slow. Not in forty-eight hours will you brush away the cobwebs of the workaday world and prepare for the reception of sweet Nature's influence a mind free from all uncharitableness: their skies, not their characters, they change who sail over-seas. From all blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, you must seek to be delivered, else you will walk in vain. For most men walk in a vain show, and the perpetual perambulation of the streets of Vanity Fair is a poor preparation for the Delectable Mountains.—But take heart. ”

“ Amongst these hops fearless, while I sit still and silent with half-closed eyes, the thrush or the grey-bird, chasing insects a few feet from my foot; while above me, on the very stump against which I lean, perches the various-coloured high-holder.—Truly, it seems as if Nature had taken me to be one with her, recognised me as part of her manifold immensity, looked upon me as a consort, a co-mate.
And am I not a part of her? It needs not to comprehend the harmonious workings of mighty natural laws to perceive the unity of all things. Each minutest spot on this earth verifies the truth. ”

“ The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.... These are the only hours that are not wasted—these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of Nature. ”

“ A country town of a Sunday afternoon in Canada is the quietest of existing things. Everything in it seems lifeless. Not a sound is heard from any side. One's own cough startles one in the very streets. Two cows slowly wend their way homewards; an over-ripe apple falls heavily in an unkempt front garden—even these signs of semi-life are a relief. Rows of youths, all dressed in sombre black, and all smoking cigars fearfully if not wonderfully made, lean against the walls of the inn at the corner, or stand in silent knots about the horse-gnawed "hitching-post." ”

“ Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great pæan of Being that Nature chants. By them it is that we perceive "the immense circulation of life which throbs in the ample bosom of Nature, a life which surges from an invisible source and swells the veins of this universe." ”

“ The great fight for life, the stern joys of life—the ferocious combat, the thrilling love match, the myriad sensations and emotions evoked by man's physical environment, and his struggle for existence therein—surely these live somehow somewhere packed away in his brain to-day—just as some migratory and nidificatory memories must be packed away in the brain of a bird. It is these dormant cosmic memories that a landscape revives. On how many a plain to-day does there not flow veritable human blood remuted into sap!—Terrene Nature was man's ancestral home and no man can gaze upon it unmoved. ”

“ A profound silence pervaded them, a silence so intense, so all-embracing, it seemed to overflow the forest, to go out into space, to enwrap the world in its grasp. Not a thing stirs. To be alive in that shrine of death-like soundlessness seems desecration. It is supreme, infinite, absolute; you, the living, moving onlooker, are finite and relative, a thing of time and space. To think is to disturb the serenity of its repose, for to think is to attempt to limit it, to reduce it to the level of yourself, and no thought is large enough to compass it. ”

“ The wintry woods, the white unfurrowed fields, stimulate no sense. The soul of man seems bared to the soul of Nature, and human thought and the universal mind seem contiguous and conterminous.—Silence affects the mind as darkness affects the senses: both in their impressiveness quicken the faculties to the utmost; and yet, as no sense can perceive the impalpability of darkness, so no thought can pierce the impenetrability of silence.—One must visit a wintry clime to experience emotions such as these. ”

“ Only Nature can induce such moods—
"Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,"
says the soul-tossed, self-torturing Byron. Books, music, art, the drama, philosophy, science—at bottom there seems to be something disquieting in these. They come in such questionable shape. They are the works of man; and we never altogether trust the works of man. We never feel, even with the first of those who know, that our fellow-man, who is, after all, like unto ourselves, has answered every question, allayed every doubt, stilled every fear. ”

“ Autumn in England is equally lovely. In the new world—at least in the northern regions—there is a chill in the fall of the year. The cold north-western winds, cradled amidst palæocrystic ice, and blowing over tundra and prairie, are untempered by Gulf Stream or ocean. Untempered, too, by cloud and moisture, they cut keen, and reveal the leafless landscape in all its bareness. And it may be that they bring with them the thought that for many months to come that landscape will be bare indeed—unless covered with a shroud of snow. ”

“ Nature is at once the tomb and the womb of life. What was once soil and rain and sunshine becomes grass—then hay—then beef or mutton or milk—and, in time, the very bone and muscle, the very laughter and tears of the child that plays in those fields. And when bone and muscle lay down that subtle thing called Life, give up the spirit and lie inert, they enter once again into the tomb and womb of Nature, and the mighty cycle begins afresh. ”

“ There are, I know, who affect to believe that Golf consists of country walks, diversified and embellished by pauses made for the purpose of impelling little round balls into little round holes; that mind and eye are occupied chiefly with the beauties of Nature, and that the impulsion of the insignificant sphere into the insignificant void is, as it were, but a sop to Cerberus, or a cock sacrificed to the Æsculapius of this sporting age. "How greatly," said to me once a fair and innocent stranger to my links—"how greatly this beautiful landscape must enhance the pleasure of your game!" ”

“ What matters it the petty perturbations of the mind? What signify the paltry upheavings of the heart? Lay thy tired head on Nature's breast. Friendship may fade, ideals vanish, passion wane, the darling desire upon which thou hast staked thine all may prove to have been snatched from thee before thy very eyes.—Take heart. Always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above thee, in presence of which the petty and the paltry flee away.
I know no more comfortable medicament than the quiet companionship of Nature. The trees breathe a salutary air. The fields invite to repose. ”

“ Never have I thought so much, never have I realised my own existence so much, been so much alive, been so much myself if I may so say, as in those journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when I stay in one place; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to work. ”

“ It is a complex, it is a profound enigma, this of the appeal of the beauty of nature to the senses and emotions of man. For Beauty, we must remember, is not an attribute of the external thing. Beauty is in the soul that feels, the mind that thinks, the memory that remembers. That is beautiful which brings to mind and memory and soul, ecstatic thrill, exalted feeling. ”

“ One such spot I have, and from it many a lesson I have learned.—It is a great amphitheatre, Nature-made, vast and open. It slopes to the north and west, and all about it and about are green trees—green trees and shrubs and lowly plants. In the whole space I am the one spectator—save for little grasses that stand on tiptoe to look and listen; save for little weeds that nod their heads; and a beetle crawling heedless over dry and shining grains of sand. In the orchestral centre, where, in ancient Greece, should stand the lighted altar, there chances to be a little crimson maple ”

“ Never shall I forget the day upon which—and the walk during which—there flared upon me like a great and sudden light the fact that the whole cosmos was alive—was Life; that it was not composed of two dissimilar things: (a) a gross and ponderable "matter"; and (b) an immaterial imponderable "mind." There is no such dichotomy in Nature. All is immaterial, spiritual, living. Every particle in me is alive; but every particle in me came from Nature; and, as I cannot create life, life must have existed potentially in those particles. ”

“ At two-thirty on Monday morning he started on his return journey—afoot; breakfasted halfway in; and was at his desk in as good time as spirits.—Profit? That early morning walk picked him up for the week. Pleasure? My dear practical sir, would you had been with him! Would you had felt the quiet, the serenity, the calming influence of unsullied Nature; the supreme repose in those early morning hours, the solitude, the vastness, the expansion of soul and spirit beneath the silent stars, the quiet morn. He saw the full moon pale and set; he saw great Nature slowly wake ”

“ The Unity of Nature § 24
The lesson I learned was this: Nature is vast. Nature knows nothing of Time. Nor does Nature know anything of Space. It is we who import spatial and temporal limitations into Nature. Because we look up with two eyes, and feel forth with two arms, and walk about with two legs, we think, not only that our, but that the, universe is an infinite sphere!—an actual objective sphere of which each stupidly assumes that he is the centre! ”

“ For what is Conscience, that inward monitor which, whatever your creed, bids you walk thus and not otherwise, that applauds you when you do right, and shames you when you go wrong? From one point of view, Conscience is the evolved consensus of mankind, that inherited instinct which declares that only such actions as subserve the welfare of the race are right, and that all others are wrong ”

“ Some epimethean enthusiast, carried away by the anticipated delights of a walk, will suddenly make up his mind to take one; will hastily stuff some things into a bag, and will start off at four o'clock in the morning with some vague and distant goal in view. He will think to roll John Burroughs and Richard Jefferies into one in his minute observation of Nature, and to outdo Wordsworth and Amiel combined in his philosophico-poetical disquisitions on the same; he will rid his mind of the world and the worldly, and float in themes transcendental and abstruse. ”

“ So many creeds, so many religions, pin me down to this little planet. How many earths are there in the visible heavens? Are there terrestrial sinners on each and all? If so, for how many deaths did the vicarious mercy of the Almighty call? And even if we travel outside the realm of Christendom, still we find our little earth regarded as the centre of thought, the only scene upon which the great drama of Being is enacted: for so many philosophies and religions accentuate the isolated existence of individual human beings, and limit their application to the periphery of this speck in space. ”

“ If you will keep but a corner of your mind free from the carking cares of barter and commerce—if only by half-holiday jaunts and Sabbath-day journeys, great will be your reward. By the end of the third or fourth day's tramp, what with the exhilarating exercise, the fresh air, the peace and loneliness, the long hours of mental quietude, the freedom from the petty distractions of social and official life, if you are humble and childlike, the world forgetting by the world forgot—the scales will fall from your eyes ”

“ The world is too much with us. The myriad trivial details of everyday life hide from us that of which they ought in reality perpetually to remind us. For, after all, what is all action, even as manifested in these trivial details, but a struggle to overcome space and time, the limitations of the finite; and what, again, is all thought but a struggle to conceive the infinite? ”

“ A dazzling sun transformed the dull dead landscape of the night into a blinding spangled sheet of purest white. Involuntarily the eyes half closed against that glare. No wonder the sub-Arctic eye lacks the large frank openness of those of softer realms; against even the summer sunshine the protection of approximated eyelids is needed, as the crow's-feet of the farmers' features prove. If Canada has earned the title of Our Lady of the Snows, she certainly equally deserves the title of Our Lady of the Sunshine; nowhere is sunshine so bright or so abundant ”

“ Instead of observing Nature he will find Nature—in the shape of the rustics (and the rustics' dogs) —very narrowly observing him, not always with sympathetic or benignant gaze. Instead of deep and transcendental meditations rising spontaneously to his mind, he will find curt and practical questions assailing his ear as to who he is and what he is doing there.—My dear but epimethean enthusiast, you must know that Nature is a jealous mistress. ”

“ In Nature, as in Man, resides that Spirit of Eternal Things which we call Life: a thing incomprehensible and divine; transcending thought; one and a unit; one with the thing that is, and one with that which asks itself what it is and whence it came; revealing itself under the aspects of time and space, yet unbounded by time or space; manifesting itself under an infinitude of forms, yet remaining one and the same ”