Noble nature

“ And with regard to this it is desirable to know that just as the noble Nature prepares in the first age, it is prepared and ordained by the care or foresight of Universal Nature, which ordains and appoints the particular Nature where-ever existing, to attain its perfection. ”

“ Of a beautiful and noble race, endowed with susceptible senses and a cheerful spirit under a mild sky, they lived and bloomed in the full health of existence; and, favoured by a rare combination of circumstances, accomplished all that the finite nature of man is capable of. ”

“ Who would not willingly pierce the pensive gloom, or dwell among the brighter glories of the golden age, to acquire by a warm and glowing, but correct and chaste contemplation of the beautiful and sublime works of nature, these ravishing sensations, and gain this noble fervor of the imagination? ”

“ For there can be no comprehensive culture of the human mind,—no high and harmonious development of its powers, and the various faculties of the soul; unless all those deep feelings of life—that mighty, productive energy of human nature, the marvellous imagination, be awakened and excited, and by that excitement and exertion, attain an expansive, noble and beautiful form. ”

“ Enough, indeed, and more than enough, is written to prove that the author possesses, in no ordinary measure, 'the vision and the faculty divine' for discerning and discriminating what is noble in man and what is beautiful in nature. ”

“ Or is the philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? ”

“ "I think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject." ”

“ Much more then is it probable that the first men, being less removed from their divine origin, were more perfect, possessing a brighter intelligence, and that with Nature as a guide, a pure intellect for master, and the lovely world as a model, they originated these noble arts, and by gradually improving them brought them at length, from small beginnings, to perfection. ”

“ Along the brook-banks under the Catskills—to me about the loveliest banks on earth, in the late spring and early summer days—I have never seen such fairy loveliness as I find here upon this bleak islet, where nature seems to have been playing at Switzerland. Green and yellow mosses, ankle-deep and spotted with blood-red stains, carpet the crags and little vales and cradle-like hollows. Wonderful to behold! flowers pink and white, yellow, red and blue, are countless as dew-drops, and breathe out upon the pure air that odor, so spirit-like. ”

“ All that we anticipated of the sunset, or the after-sunset, is now present. The ocean with its waves of Tyrian dye laced with silver, the tinted bergs, the dark-blue inland hills and brown headlands underlie a sky of unutterable beauty. The west is all one paradise of colors. Surely, nature, if she follows as a mourner on the footsteps of the fall, also returns jubilant and glorious to the scenes of Eden. Here, between the white light of day and the dark of the true evening, shade and brightness, like Jacob and the angel, now meet and wrestle for the mastery. ”

“ Our good angels bear us company as we pass.
What an exquisite specimen of nature’s handiwork it looks to be, in the blaze of noon! It shines like polished silver dripping with dews. The painter is all ready with his colors, having sketched the outlines with lead. The water streams down in all directions in little rills and falls, glistening in the light like molten glass. Veins of gem-like transparency, blue as sapphire, obliquely cross the opaque white of the prodigious mass, the precious beauty of which no language can picture. ”

“ Have we not the foundation of their experience to build upon, ready to our hands, whenever we are wise enough to set about raising the noble edifice? Did the ancients possess any advantages over us from nature, either in point of intellectual faculties, or the animal œconomy? ”

“ The sunshine, skies, “the pomp and circumstance of” ocean, sweet smells, and sounds, and one’s own joyous, healthy feelings, flowing out and washing out as they flow the natural sadness of the soul, cannot take away nor cover up that which really and everlastingly is, and ever will be, namely, the sentiment of mournfulness. Nature here is at a funeral forever, and these beauties, so delicately fashioned, are but flowers in the coffin. ”

“ Like cumulous clouds, icebergs are perpetually mimicking the human face. This fine crystal creature, by a change in our position, becomes a gigantic bust of poet or philosopher, leaning back and gazing with a fixed placidity into the skies. In the brilliant noon, portions of it glisten like a glassy waterfall. The cold, dead white, the subtle greens, the blues, shadows of the softest slate, all contrast with the flashing brightness in a way most exquisite to behold. True to all the forms of nature that swell to the sublime, an iceberg grows upon the mind astonishingly. ”

“ That reverence for the spiritual nature of man, as a direct emanation from Deity, which all should cherish, is, also, to be regarded as a part of judicious self-culture. Cultivate an habitual recognition of your celestial attributes, and strive to elevate your whole being into congenial association with the divinity within you:—this do for the benefit of others,
"Be noble! ”

“ The deep fluting, the wrinkled folds and cavities, over and through which the green and silvery water rushed back into the sea, rivalled the most exquisite sculpture. And nature not only gives her marbles, with the finest lines, the most perfect lights and shades, she colors them also. She is no monochromist, but polychroic, imparting such touches of dove-tints, emerald and azure, as she bestows upon her gems and her skies. ”

“ Cardross's independent spirit rather revolted from the gift, at least satisfied him about Helen's comfort during her temporary absence. And once more, for Helen's sake, the earl kept silence. But he felt as if every good and tender impulse of his nature were hardening into stone.
Hardened at the core Lord Cairnforth could never be; no man can whose heart has once admitted into its deepest sanctuary the love of One who, when all human loves fail, still whispers, "We will come in unto him, and make our abode with him"—ay, be it the forlornest bodily tabernacle in which immortal soul ever dwelt. ”

“ To say that “nature” generates and evolves new men and women, is no explanation of the phenomena of reproduction. Nature has no physical body, no weight, length, breadth, nor thickness, no intellect, memory nor will-power; nor can it voluntarily generate force nor motion. It follows that “nature” cannot form the spermatozoön nor the ovum; cannot cause them to unite and fuse into a germ-cell; nor cause the necessary atoms and cells to assemble and group themselves into the chemical combinations and mechanical arrangements required to build up the embryo body, its organs and parts. ”

“ More frequent, though, than headlands and perpendicular sea-fronts are the sea-slopes, often bald, tame, and wearisome to the eye, now and then the perfection of all that is picturesque and rough, a precipice gone to pieces, its softer portions dissolved down to its roots, its flinty bones left standing, a savage scene that scares away all thoughts of order and design in nature. ”

“ While the outside of this heap of fragments is white, with tints of green, touched here and there with what seems to be the most delicate bronze and gilding; every crevice, where there is a shadow lurking, is a blue, the purity and softness of which cannot be described nor easily imagined. To one who has any feeling for color, it has a sentiment as sweet as any thing in all visible nature. A pure, white surface, like this fine opaque ice, seen through deep shade produces blue, and such a blue as one sees in the stainless sky when it is full of warmth and light. ”

“ You will do well to recollect, that nature works in other ways in the high north than in the high Cordilleras and Alps, and especially in the latter, where she carefully slides her mer-de-glace into the warm valley, and gently melts it off, letting it run merrily and freely to the sea, every crystal fetter broken into silvery foam. But in Greenland she heaves her mile-wide glacier, in all its flinty hardness, into the great deep bodily, and sends it, both a glory and a terror, to flourish or perish as the currents of the solemn main move it to wintry or to summer climes. ”

“ Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge. ”

“ But the distance between twenty and sixty—the life beginning and the life advancing toward its close— was frequently apparent; also between an active, original mind, requiring humanity for its study, and one whose whole bent was among the dry bones of ancient learning—the difference, in short, between learning and knowledge—the mere student and the man who only uses study as a means to the perfecting of his whole nature, his complete existence as a human being. ”

“ The perpetual change of seasons, varying the aspect of the outside world every month, every week—nay, almost every day, is a continual interest to observant minds, and especially so to intelligent children, who are as yet lying on the breast of Mother Nature only, nor have begun to feel or understand the darker and sadder interests of human passion and emotion. ”

“ Chapter 2 It was on a June day—ten years after that bright June day when the minister of Cairnforth had walked with such a sad heart up to Cairnforth Castle, and seen for the first time its unconscious heir—the poor little orphan baby, who in such apparent mockery was called "the Earl." The woods, the hills, the loch, looked exactly the same—nature never changes. ”

“ Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble. ”

“ Often he would pass hours at a time sitting as now, with his feeble hands folded on his lap, his head bent, and his eyes closed, or else open and looking out straight before him— calmly, but with an infinite yearning in them that would have seemed painful to those who did not know how peaceful his inmost nature was. ”

“ Very soon the earl gathered round him, besides acquaintances, a knot of real friends, affectionate and true, who, in the charm of his cultivated mind, and the simplicity of his good heart, found ample amends for every thing that nature had denied him, the loss of which he bore so cheerfully and uncomplainingly. ”

“ When will they be inspired by the magnificent scenery of our own world, imbibe the fresh enthusiasm of a new heaven and a new earth, and soar upon the expanded wings of truth and liberty? Is not nature as original—her truths as captivating—her aspects as various, as lovely, as grand—her Promethean fire as glowing in this, our Western hemisphere, as in that of the East? ”

“ Here hast thou that noble human race, that delightful creation, which has been granted sense and immortality. How it bears on it the image of the infinite God, and the likeness to Him, that wilt thou recognise by the variety of His creations. As in a looking-glass wilt thou see the worth of this thy human race. ”

“ The same charm which I had observed in the features of society, and which I had traced to harmony in religion, appeared to me, here and elsewhere, transferred in a great degree to the very soil, to its culture, and to its embellishment. Nature itself seemed to have borrowed a grace, and a glory, from the holy Faith, of which such monuments were visible at every turn, in spires and towers peering above the green trees, and gleaming amid the wide-spread bounties of God, whose adorable name they seemed to display as the giver of all. ”

“ A nobler race should reach their fruitful clime;
Or, if a common source all nations claim,
Their lineage, form and faculties the same,
What sovereign secret cause, yet undisplay'd,
This wondrous change in nature's work has made;
Why various powers of soul and tints of face
In different lands diversify the race;
To whom the Guide: Unnumbered causes lie,
In earth and sea, in climate, soil and sky,
That fire the soul, or damp the genial flame,
And work their wonders on the human frame. ”

“ But if without derogation to the Divine Power, we may conceive such ministers and personify them by the term Nature, we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light amidst the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the vertebrate idea, under its old ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the human form. ”

“ He delighted in representations of them; and in embodying his conceptions of the gods, he gave them the human form as the noblest and most beautiful of all forms. Nature was merely a background exquisitely beautiful, but not to be enjoyed without the presence of man. ”

“ In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,—the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,—but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. ”

“ Should this first man have been discovered originally surrounded with all the appliances of an after-civilization, clad, and housed, and rendered artificial? nor rather, in a noble and naturally royal aspect appear on the stage of life as king of the natural creation, sole warder of a garden of fruits, with all his food thus readily concocted, and an eastern climate tempered to his nakedness? ”

“ We see no pomp of words, no far-fetched thoughts, no theatrical turgidity, no ambitious speculations, no indefinite longings; but we read the manners and customs of the primitive nations, and lessons of moral wisdom and human nature as it is, and the sights and wonders of the external world, all narrated with singular simplicity, yet marvelous artistic skill. ”