of life. And of all the
joys of life which may fairly come under the head of recreation there is
nothing more great, more refreshing, more beneficial in the widest sense
of the word, than a real love of the beauty of the world. Some people
cannot feel it. To such people I can only say, as Turner once said to a
lady who complained that she could not see sunsets as he painted them,
"Don't you wish you could, madam?" But to those who have some feeling
that the natural world has beauty in it I would say, Cultivate this
feeling and encourage it in every way you can. Consider the seasons, the
joy of the spring, the splendour of the summer, the sunset colours of
the autumn, the delicate and graceful bareness of winter trees, the
beauty of snow, the beauty of light upon water, what the old Greek
called the unnumbered smiling of the sea.

In the feeling for that beauty, if we have it, we possess a pearl of
great price. I say of great price, but it is something which costs us
nothing because it is all a part of the joy which is in the world for
everybody who cares for it. It is the "joy in widest commonalty spread";
it is a rich possession for us if we care for it, but in possessing it
we deprive nobody else. The enjoyment of it, the possession of it,
excites neither greed nor envy, and it is something which is always
there for us and which may take us out of the small worries of life.
When we are bored, when we are out of tune, when we have little worries,
it clears our feelings and changes our mood if we can get in touch with
the beauty of the natural world. There is a quaint but apposite
quotation from an old writer which runs as follows: "I sleep, I drink
and eat, I read and meditate, I walk in my neighbour's pleasant fields
and see all the varieties of natural beauty ... and he who hath so many
forms of joy must needs be very much in love with sorrow and
peevishness, who loseth all these pleasures and chooseth to sit upon his
little handful of thorns."

There is a story of a man whom others called poor, and who had just
enough fortune to support himself in going about the country in the
simplest way and studying and enjoying the life and beauty of it. He was
once in the company of a great millionaire who was engaged in business,
working at it daily and getting richer every year, and the poor man said
to the millionaire, "I am a richer man than you are." "How do you make
that out?" said the millionaire. "Why," he replied, "I