the earth,
trees, corn, flowers, and grass'; and he wrote in his letter to
Heinrich Murdach (Letter 106):

Believe me, I have proved it; you will find more in the woods
than in books; trees and stones will teach you what no other
teacher can.

He looked upon all natural objects as 'rays of the Godhead,' copies
of a great original.

His contemporary, Hugo von St Victor, wrote:

The whole visible world is like a book written by the finger of
God. It is created by divine power, and all human beings are
figures placed in it, not to shew the free-will of man, but as a
revelation and visible sign, by divine will, of God's invisible
wisdom. But as one who only glances at an open book sees marks on
it, but does not read the letters, so the wicked and sensual man,
in whom the spirit of God is not, sees only the outer surface of
visible beings and not their deeper parts.

German mystics wrote in the same strain; for instance, the popular
Franciscan preacher, Berthold von Regensburg (1272),

Whose sermons on fields and meadows drew many thousands of
hearers, and moved them partly by the unusual freshness and
vitality of his pious feeling for Nature,

in spite of many florid symbolical accessories, such as we find again
in Ekkehart and other fifteenth-century mystics, and especially in
Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek.

The northern prophetess and foundress of an Order Birgitta (1373)
held that the breath of the Creator was in all visible things: 'We
feel it pervading us in her visions,' says Hammerich,[13]

Whether by gurgling brook or snow-covered firs. It is with us
when the prophetess leads us along the ridges of the Swedish
coast with their surging waves or down the shaft of a mine, or to
wander in the quiet of evening through vineyards between roses
and lilies, while the dew is falling and the bells ring out the
Ave Maria.

Vincentius von Beauvais (1264) in his _Speculum Naturae_ demonstrates
the value of studying Nature from a religious and moral point of
view; and the Carthusian general, Dionysius von Rickel (1471), in his
paper _On the beauty of the world and the glory of God (De venustate
mundi et de pulchritudine Dei)_ says in Chapter xxii.: 'All the
beauty of the animal world is nothing but the reflection and out-flow
of the original beauty of God,' and gives as special examples:

Roses, lilies, and other beautiful and fragran