_I.--TO WHAT END IS NATURE?_

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It
writes biographies, histories, and criticisms. The foregoing generations
beheld God face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also
have an original relation to the universe? Why should we grope among the
dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out
of its faded wardrobe? Let us interrogate the great apparition that
shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire to what end is Nature.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and Soul.
Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which
philosophy distinguishes as _not me_, that is both Nature and Art, all
other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature.
Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man: space,
the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will
with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But
his operations, taken together, are so insignificant, a little chipping,
baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of
the world on the human mind they do not vary the result.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as
from society. But if a man would be alone let him look at the stars. The
rays that come from those heavenly bodies will separate between him and
what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent
with this design, to give man in the heavenly bodies the perpetual
presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they
are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men
would 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.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort
her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
When we speak of Nature in this manner we have a distinct but most
poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by
manifold natural objects. The charming landscape which I saw this
morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller
owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none
owns the landscape. Ther