is chary of striking scenes
and startling impressions and thrilling experiences, affectation, with
profane haste, proceeds to amuse itself with artificial feelings, and
pretended raptures. This counterfeited appreciation, like all
counterfeits, by its greater cheapness drives out the real enjoyment;
and the person who indulges in affectation soon finds the power of
genuine appreciation entirely gone. Affectation is worse than
obtuseness, for obtuseness is at least honest: it may mend its ways. But
affectation is self-deception. The affected person does not know what
true appreciation of Nature is: he cannot see his error; and
consequently cannot correct it.

THE PENALTY.

+The life of man can be no deeper and richer than the objects and
thoughts on which it feeds.+--Without appreciation and love for Nature
we can eat and drink and sleep and do our work. The horse and ox,
however, can do as much. Obtuseness to the beauty and meaning of Nature
sinks us to the level of the brutes. Cut off from the springs of
inspiration, our lives stagnate, our souls shrivel, our sensibilities
wither. And just as stagnant water soon becomes impure, and swarms with
low forms of vegetable and animal life, so the stagnant soul, which
refuses to reflect the beauty of sun and star and sky, soon becomes
polluted with sordidness and selfishness and sensuality.

CHAPTER XII.

Art.

Nature is incomplete. She leaves man to provide for himself his raiment,
shelter, and surroundings. Nature in her works throws out suggestions of
beauty, rather than its perfect and complete embodiment. Her gold is
imbedded in the rock. Her creations are limited by the particular
material and the narrow conditions which are at her disposal at a given
time and place. To seize the pure ideal of beauty which Nature suggests,
but never quite realizes; to select from the universe of space and the
eternity of time those materials and forms which are perfectly adapted
to portray the ideal beauty; to clothe the abodes and the whole physical
environment of man with that beauty which is suggested to us in sky and
stream and field and flower; to present to us for perpetual
contemplation the form and features of ideal manhood and womanhood; to
hold before our imagination the deeds of brave men, and the devotion of
saintly women; to thrill our hearts with the victorious struggle of the
hero and the death-defying passion of the lover;--this is the mission
and the si