th song. One has often heard it
said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos
or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his
humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is
probably the truth--that man has no feelings of his own that were not
Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but
a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in
varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature
has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in
colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic
experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable
microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in
the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that
have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into
him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of
Wordsworth's maiden.

Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with
the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the
difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it
put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass,
without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into
existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by
precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between
their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man
seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used
different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like
in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike
too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus
clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree,
alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the
thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like
stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him
before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of
Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say,
a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as
apple-blossom of the apple?

If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemp