d Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and
Audubon, and many others familiar with their haunts and habits, their
affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our
fellow-creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be
sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and
vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings--of the wren, who pipes
her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal
of the cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the
waterfall! In cave-roof? Yea--we have seen it so--just beneath the
cornice. But most frequently we have detected her procreant cradle on
old mossy stump, mouldering walls or living rock--sometimes in cleft of
yew-tree or hawthorn--for hang the globe with its imperceptible orifice
in the sunshine or the storm, and St. Catharine sits within heedless of
the outer world, counting her beads with her sensitive breast that
broods in bliss over the priceless pearls.

Ay, the men we have named, and many other blameless idolaters of Nature,
have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us
their religion. All our great poets have loved the _Minnesingers_ of the
woods--Thomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, as dearly as Spenser, and
Shakespeare, and Milton. From the inarticulate language of the groves,
they have inhaled the enthusiasm that inspired some of the finest of
their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature" must every poet
be--and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world
of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it,
some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his
perception--his emotion how profound--while his spirit is thus appealed
to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy
perpetual even in the most solitary places!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study
nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge to know and
to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in
old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning,
perhaps, to acquire it when they sighed to think that "they who look out
of the windows were darkened;" and that, while they had been instructed
how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and
that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the science of
seeing has no