lation
of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her
varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation
through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe.
The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid
pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike
dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only
come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all
things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the
sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or
whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself
in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places,
dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs
its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass.

As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so
endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest
moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as
though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the
universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of
rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the
sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be
hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of
the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems
to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from
fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights
we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them
on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in
thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that
we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the
best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some
day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the
white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across
the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity
in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how
much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods.

Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expres