Beauty of nature

“ I had always passionately loved Nature in her adornments of colour and of dewy pearls, and clung to her closely with the gladsomeness of youth. Here I made the discovery that a landscape which we look upon in sympathetic mood shines with enhanced brilliancy; or as I put the truth into words at the time, "The more intimately we attach ourselves to Nature, the more she glows with beauty and returns us all our affection." ”

“ Call nature the grand revelation! Is it more to go to nature and know it than to know God? Are there deeper depths in nature, higher sublimities, thoughts more captivating and glorious? In the mineral and vegetable shapes are there finer themes than in the life of Jesus? In the storms and glorious pilings of the clouds, are there manifestations of greatness and beauty more impressive than in the tragic sceneries of the cross? Nature is the realm of things, the supernatural is the realm of powers. ”

“ What a source of pleasure, solace, and recreation, then, is open to him who knows how to distinguish and appreciate the beautiful in Nature! He hears in every breeze and every ripple of water a voice which the uncultivated ear cannot hear; and he sees in every fleeting cloud and varied aspect of Nature some beauty which the ignorant cannot see. ”

“ Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashing through storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, it is ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify our thoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the key is in the human heart. ”

“ It gives the kind of joy we find in nature, in the golden-green of light under tree-branches, or the mingled green and gray of tree and rock shadows, or the pearl and rose of sunrise and sunset. We call the deep content which results from such surroundings the influence of nature, and forget to name the less spiritual, the more human condition of well-being which comes to us in our homes from being surrounded with something which in a degree atones for lack of nature's beauty. ”

“ We shall have discovered an identity between what is in Nature and what is in us. In looking on Nature, we shall have been introduced into a Presence, greater than ourselves but like ourselves, which stirs in us this which we feel. When we see Beauty in Nature we are discovering that Nature is not merely a body, but has or is a soul. And the joy we feel is produced by the satisfaction our soul feels in coming into touch and harmony with this soul of Nature. Our soul is recognising samenesses between what is in it and what is in the soul of Nature, and feels joy in the recognition. ”

“ Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts from birds. ”

“ So now our Artist will have experienced true spirituality in its highest degree; and having experienced also the most elemental in his nature, he will perforce have come in touch with Nature along her whole range. And his soul being at the finest pitch of sensitiveness, he will be able to appreciate Natural Beauty as never before. And nothing less than natural beauties, and nothing less than these beauties at their best, will in his exalted mood be satisfying to him. He will be driven irresistibly into the open air and the warm sunshine, and to the bosom of Mother-Earth. ”

“ From shapeless, colourless tubers, which attach themselves to trunks and branches of trees and cling on to rocks, there emerge these peerless aristocrats of the flower-world, finished, polished, immaculate, and reigning supreme through sheer distinction and excellence at every point—and also because theirs is clearly no ephemeral convolvulus-like beauty which will fade and vanish away in a twinkling, but is a beauty intensely matured, strong and deep and firm. ”

“ You will catch glimpses of the divinity of Nature. Most of us travel threescore years and ten stone-blind in a world of marvellous beauty. Why does the artist see so much more in every fence-corner and on every hill-side than we, set face to face with the grandest landscapes? ”

“ Nature's stores of beauty and wonder, the fine analogies of moral truth that lie hidden under them, the new setting forth of nature which is Art's beautiful work,—how numberless, how measureless the sources of pleasure to the mind once quickened to see and taste them! ”

“ What is the real aim of what we call Nature-lessons, Nature-teaching, Nature-work? It is surely to foster delight in beauty, so that our hearts shall leap up at sight of the rainbow until we die. For, indeed, if we lose that uplift of the heart, some part of us has died already. ”

“ The creation of beauty is Art.
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. ”

“ The earth, teeming with sights of wonder, and breathed over with a divine music, would be to its inhabitants, in such a condition, but a waste and thankless wilderness. And which is nature—the bare, the imperceptible, for any beauty it contains, or the riches of the mind's discovery, the imaginative creation? We are inventive, that we may discover what nature is; nor is that the less, but rather the more, nature which is art. ”

“ The sense of Beauty we all possess in some slight degree is in itself a proof that behind the outward appearance of Nature there is a spiritual reality—an "I"—just as behind the outward appearance of the man which the artist-midge sees there is the "I" of the man. And by cultivating this sense—that is, by training and developing our capacity to see deeper into the heart of Nature, see more significance and meaning in each shade and change of her features, and read more understandingly what is going on deep within her soul—we shall enable ourselves to see a fuller and richer Natural Beauty. ”

“ Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation. ”

“ On the other hand, when we are in a glad and overflowing mood we shall be extraordinarily responsive to Nature's appeal, and see Beauty in a rugged, leafless oak tree or a poor old woman at the corner of some mean street. And if when we are in such a mood Nature happens to be at her best and brightest, as on some spring morning, the Beauty we shall then see will be overpowering, and we shall scarcely be able to contain ourselves for ecstasy of joy. ”

“ Amongst these may be our Naturalist-Artist who year after year, drawn to Sikkim and Kashmir by his love of Natural Beauty, would learn to know Nature in the wonderfully varied aspects under which she is to be seen in those favoured regions, who would come into ever-deepening communion with her, would yearly see more Beauty in her, and would communicate to us the enjoyment he had felt.
But Natural Beauty includes within its scope a great deal more than only natural scenery. It includes the beauty of all natural objects—men and women as well as mountains, animals, and plants. ”

“ I am not an art connoisseur and should never dare express my opinion ‘as one having authority,’ but I do love beauty, and some of your beautiful woodland scenes, some ferns or mosses or flowers or birds have power to give ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ You reveal Nature’s very soul and as a most ardent worshipper of Nature and as a child of the Heavenly Father whose thoughts you have so often interpreted, I want to thank you. ”

“ As the Artist puts himself in touch with the Heart of Nature, the dominant impression he receives is of Nature ever straining after higher, perfection, ever striving to achieve a greater excellence, and create beings with higher and higher, modes of life. He sees her straining upward in the mountain, in the trees, in the climbers on the trees, in every blade of grass. He sees the whole of life, straining to achieve higher and higher forms, more perfect flowers, more intelligent animals, more spiritual men. ”

“ Nature alone represents the evolved intelligence, the harmony, the soul of the cosmos, and its ideal made real in law; where, then, shall one begin his quest for truth more fittingly than at the gate of nature, where Beauty is the portress and Beauty is the guide? ”

“ Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws to his science, not less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle [Pg 200] of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. ”

“ We see, indeed, what Nature really is. We see the reality behind the appearance—the content within the outward form. We are not for the moment concerned with the cause but with the character of Nature. ”

“ Letting observation sleep, what can you know of nature? and you are a judge of landscape indeed. So it is that the world is taught to think of nature, as seen through other men's eyes, without any reference to its own original powers of perception, and much natural beauty is lost. ”

“ Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful, and generous. She pours forth poetry and beauty on all creatures and all plants that are allowed free development. She owns the secret of happiness, of which no one has ever robbed her. ”

“ These great works owe their existence to the fact that they faithfully represent some great outstanding type, or because they truthfully reveal the characteristic and essential beauty of nature expressed in one of her many moods. ”

“ But we confess, for our own part, that it is the structure itself that affords us that soft ecstasy of contemplation, sense of a perfection before which the mind stops short, silenced and filled with the completeness of beauty unbroken, which Art so seldom gives, though Nature often attains it by the simplest means, through the exquisite perfection of a flower or a stretch of summer sky. ”

“ Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.
The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. ”

“ We have, therefore, ample evidence that Nature is actuated by an intention to enrich perfection and is continually working towards it. So we have confidence that Nature, hard and exacting though she be, is only exacting in order that the Highest may be attained. We know that Nature is aiming at the Highest and nothing short of the Highest. And all the spirit of daring and adventure in us leaps to the call she makes. ”

“ By observing Nature in so many different aspects, and by comparing our impressions with one another, we ought to understand Nature better than any other race. And by entering more readily into communion with her we, better than others, should realise the Beauty she possesses. ”

“ In the pitching and tossing of his 'ships of thought' he never lost the consciousness of Nature's beauty, and would pray the clouds to carry his sighs with them in their tranquil course through heaven. ”

“ The more we find ourselves drawn to Nature and in harmony and love with her, the more Beauty do we see. In closest reciprocity Love of Nature inspires Natural Beauty and Natural Beauty promotes Love of Nature. ”

“ And in their turn must lie as low. The Beautiful in Nature and Art.—In looking at our nature, we discover among its admirable endowments the sense or perception of beauty. We see the germ of this in every human being ”

“ When, therefore, our Artist sums up his impressions of Nature as epitomised in the life of the forest; when he has been able to feel that he has, as it were, got inside the skin of Nature, entered into her Spirit and really understood her—as the artist-midge we have referred to would enter into the nature of a man and try and understand him—he will probably find that Nature works in very much the same way as he himself works, and is of much the same character as himself. ”

“ And with his instinctive love of Natural Beauty thus confirmed and strengthened by this testing of his instinct against what cool reasoning on the facts revealed by observation in the forest had to say about it, he can with lightened heart search still further into Nature, and see her in higher, wider, deeper aspects than the forest alone can disclose. ”

“ By so doing, our souls become more sensitive to the impressions of Nature, and we are better able to express those impressions. Our power of vision increases. Our soul's eye acquires a keener insight and sees deeper into the soul of Nature. We are able to enter more into the spirit of Nature, and the spirit of Nature is able to enter more into us. We arrive at a completer understanding between ourselves and Nature, are more in harmony with her, and consequently see more Beauty. ”

“ He never deliberately set out to paint the landscape in set language as we passed along, but a brief word dropped here and there upon our way, telling of some aspect of beauty newly observed and newly registered, showed clearly that every fresh encounter with nature served to add another gem to the hoarded store of beauty that lay resident in his mind. ”