and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double!
. . .
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which
Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives."

So Emerson, of the man who can yield himself to nature's
influences. "And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real
to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like
summer rain, copious but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable
essence." So, once again, Matthew Arnold in his striking
sonnet, "Quiet Work":

"One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,
One lesson which in every wind is blown,
One lesson of two duties kept at one
Though the loud world proclaim their enmity--
Of toil unsevered from tranquillity,
Of labour that in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose,
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.
Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring,
Man's senseless uproar mingling with his toil,
Still do thy quiet ministers move on,
Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting:
Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil,
Labourers that shall not fail when man is gone."

It is in nature, then, and in her subtle but potent workings on the
human soul that we shall find at least one antidote for the undue
and portentous tension of our day. To say this is not to
depreciate science, but to put it in its rightful setting. Nor is it
to depreciate culture, but to bring it into due perspective, and to
vitalise it. Nor is it to depreciate art, but to endow it with glow,
with variety, with loyalty to truth.

According to Pope, the proper study of mankind is man. How
shallow, how harmful such a dictum! Contrast Kant's deeper
insight. "Two things fill me with awe--the starry heaven
without, and the moral law within." That famous apophthegm
leads us nearer to the saving truth. For it contemplates man, not
in his isolation, but as placed in a marvellous physical
environment: to understand one you must understand the other
also. Add the thought expressed in the fundamental principle of
Nature Mysticism--the thought that nature is spiritual