NATURE will not have us fret and

She does not like our benevolence or our learning, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we

come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperancemeeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "So hot? my little sir." Nature.

WHO

loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is. sympathetic: he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these things,

Nature

Love of
Nature

Why
We Love
Nature

Beauty is of the Soul

would content him; he loves the earnest of
the north-wind, of rain, of stone, and wood,
and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer
than a beauty which we can see to the end
of. It is nature the symbol, nature certify-
ing the supernatural, body overflowed by
life, which he worships with coarse, but
sincere rites.
The Poet.

N

The

ATURE is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. sunset is unlike any thing that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. Nature.

OT in nature but in man is all the

NOT

beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. "Earth fills her lap with splendours" not her own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli, and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are

as good earth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting!

THE

Spiritual Laws.

The

HE tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led to triumph by nature.

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter,

Nature's

Healing
Power

Beauty is Within the Soul

which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. Nature.

TH

HOUGH we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation, from the work of art, of human character-a wonderful expression, through stone or canvas or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry to them,

the same we bring back more fairly illustrated in the memory. In proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet for his proper character. He must not be in any manner pinched or hindered by his material, but through his necessity of imparting himself, the adamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication of himself in his full stature and proportion. Not a conventional nature and culture need he cumber himself with, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris; but that house, and weather, and manner of living, which poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the grey unpainted wood cabin on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the constraints and seeming of a city povertywill serve as well as any other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently through all. Art.

The Subjects of Art are Always at Hand