portance in the
centre of a vast moor, or amid the threatening bulk of giant hills. He
looks upon nothing that respects him. He can find nothing subservient
to him. Therefore he flies to the crowded haunts of men, and the
porter touching his hat to him for a prospective twopence at the
railway station, is the welcome confessor of his disallowed divinity.
It is, alas! the most common and humbling feature of human nature that
we all stiffen our backs with pride when the knee of some
fellow-creature is crooked in homage to us, although that homage may be
bought for twopence! No wonder that the man in whose character vanity
is the chief essence cannot long endure contact with Nature; Nature
respects no man, and laughs in the face of the strutting egoist. But
if a man will live long enough with Nature to become reconciled to her
impassivity, he begins to recover self-respect, by recovering the
conviction of his own identity. He has that within himself which
Nature has not, the faculty of consciousness. He is but a trifling
atom in the scheme of things, but he is a thinking atom. He sees also
that all living creatures have an identity of their own. Each goes
about the scheme of life in deliberate wisdom. Why should he complain
of insignificance when the bird, the flower, the horse that drags the
plough, the beaver in the stream, the spider on the wall, make no
complaint; each accomplishing its task as intently as though it were
the one task the world wanted done? In the life of the merest insect
are toils as great, and vicissitudes as tragic, as in the most heroic
human life, and to see so much is to attach a new dignity to all kinds
of life. The bird building its nest is doing precisely the same thing
as the man who builds his house, and with an equal skill of
architecture. The flower, fighting for its life, is engaged in the
same struggle as man, for whom every breath and pulse-beat is a victory
over forces that threaten his destruction. The world is full of
identities, each unmoved by the tremendous scale of its environment.
Hence a new kind of neighbourship is possible, wider and more catholic
than the neighbourship between man and man. Kinship, not in kindred,
but in universal life, becomes possible. There is no sense of
loneliness in a country life after that discovery is made. The
emptiest field is as populous as the thronged city. The Academy of
God's art opens every spring upon the gemmed hillside.