canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and
the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race
read and write all that happens for him; to the court-house, and nations
repair his wrongs.

_III.--HER LOVELINESS_

A nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of beauty.
Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the
human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree,
the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves, a pleasure arising
from art, line, colour, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to
the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists, as light is the first of
painters.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company
Nature is medicinal, and restores their tone. But in other hours Nature
satisfies by her loveliness and without any mixture of corporeal
benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my
house from daybreak to sunrise with emotion which an angel might share.
How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements. Give me health
and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is
my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms
of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the
understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and
dreams.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant
only half the year. To the attentive eye each moment of the year has its
own beauty, and in the same fields it beholds every hour a picture which
was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Every rational creature has all Nature for his dowry and estate. He may
divest himself of it, he may creep into a corner and abdicate his
kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his
constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will he
takes up the world into himself.

_IV.--HER GIFT OF LANGUAGE_

Language is another use which Nature subserves to man. Words are signs
of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in
supernatural history. Every word which is used to express a moral or
intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from
some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted;
transgression the crossing of a line. Most of the process by which this
transf