and evident purpose of talking
to him, and teaching him--than in any other of her works; and it is
just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of
her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than
the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their
organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as
we know, be answered if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great,
ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything
well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps
a film of morning and evening mist for dew;--and instead of this,
there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when Nature is not
producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory,
and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the
most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain[14] it is all done for
us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever
placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has
this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be
seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live
always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he
ceases to feel them if he is always with them; but the sky is for all:
bright as it is, it is not

"too bright nor good
For human nature's daily food;"

it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and
exalting of the heart,--for soothing it, and purifying it from its
dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes
awful--never the same for two moments together; almost human in its
passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its
infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its
ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is
essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject
of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look
upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon
all which bears witness to the intentions of the Supreme that we are
to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew
which we share with the weed and the worm, as only a succession of
meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be
worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in
our moments of utter idleness and