oyfully to find the drama
still in its first act, and to feel still before me the ever-deepening
interest and ever-widening beauty of the miracle play to which Nature
annually bids us welcome. Across this noble playground, with its sweep
of landscape and its arch of sky, I often wander with no companions but
the flowers, and with no desire for other fellowship. Here, as in more
secluded and quiet places. Nature confides to those who love her some
deep and precious truths never to be put into words, but ever after to
rise at times over the horizon of thought like vagrant ships that come
and go against the distant sea line, or like clouds that pass along the
remotest circle of the sky as it sleeps upon the hills. The essence of
play is the unconscious overflow of life that seeks escape in perfect
self-forgetfulness. There is no effort in it, no whip of the will
driving the unwilling energies to an activity from which they shrink;
one plays as the bird sings and the brook runs and the sun shines--not
with conscious purpose, but from the simple overflow. In this sense
Nature never works, she is always at play. In perfect unconsciousness,
without friction or effort, her mightiest movements are made and her
sublimest tasks accomplished. Throughout the whole range of her
activity one never comes upon any trace of effort, any sign of
weariness; one is always impressed--as Ruskin said long ago of works of
genius--that he is standing in the presence, not of a great effort, but
of a great power; that what has been done is only a single
manifestation of the play of an inexhaustible force. There is
somewhere in the universe an infinite fountain of life and beauty which
overflows and floods all worlds with divine energy and loveliness.
When the tide recedes it pauses but a moment, and then the music of its
returning waves is heard along all shores, and its shining edges move
irresistibly on until they have bathed the roots of the solitary flower
on the highest Alp.

It is this divine method of growth which Nature opposes to our
mechanisms; it is this inexhaustible life, overflowing in
unconsciousness and boundless fulness, that she forever reveals. The
truth which underlies these two great facts needs no application to
human life. Blessed, indeed, are they who live in it, and have caught
from it something of the joy, the health, and the perennial beauty of
Nature.

Chapter VI

Earth and Sky

In nature, as in ar