when we reflect that it is incidental to the unity, the variety, the regularity, the order, the agreeableness, which render our planet a habitable world, and which make life on it possible or desirable. In such negative way, the beautiful in nature, or in the constitution of nature, which organically involves the beautiful, may be said to be, even to animals, a benefit and a blessing. That the higher order of brutes approach to some perception of it, we can hardly avoid believing: at least they seem to have a dumb joy, an inarticulate sense of the agreeable, a dim vision of pleasing imagery, when surrounded by fair and lovely objects, which is distinct from the mere satisfaction of their appetites. And, yet lower in the scale of life, the butterfly appears to have a paradise in every flower; and the bird, bowers of delight in the leafy branches, and a boundless heaven in the open air. We may well conceive, that the superadded happiness given to inferior living creatures, above what is necessary to mere existence, is connected with that which we call the beautiful in nature, and is indeed to us an essential element of such beauty. We may also conceive, that animals, whose life is near the twilight of human reason, have themselves some faint glimmer of this beauty.

But only to human reason associated with sensibility is beauty distinctly revealed. Only in a very low degree is the revelation common to all humanity. It has many hindrances, -in grossness, in ignorance, in poverty, whether savage or civilized; in the necessities, cares, toils, which belong to poverty; in affliction, grief, and pain; in whatever turns consciousness back intensely upon itself; in passion, sin, vice, and crime; in all mental and moral turbulence and darkness. The individual, therefore, who has the love of natural beauty in its developed energy, and who can fully indulge it, has a privileged and a charmed life. He is not only well constituted, but also well conditioned. He has a rare inheritance of birth and of circumstances; a marvellous wealth of faculty and of existence. The abounding beauty of the world brings, therefore, to a reflective mind, amidst its sensations of pleasure, some thoughts of pain. He cannot help but think what an in

finity of glory seems an infinity of waste, and what millions of minds are dreary, dark, and poor, while imbosomed in an immensity of riches and of light. I put out of view those whose sensibilities fail of development by inevitable fate; and those who, under oppressive influences, have no capacity for any affection, for any enjoyment, which demands cheerfulness of mind and peacefulness of heart: but numbers still remain, to whom the loss they suffer can be ascribed only to want of feeling or want of training.

Why does that farmer, who has never been sorely troubled in mind, body, or estate, come to old age, vigilant enough to the seasons, careful enough of the soil, but almost wholly dead to the miracles and the loveliness in the midst of which he has lived? Why does this sea-captain, year after year, through every turn of the day and night, behold all phases of the ocean and the heavens, and come superannuated to his arm-chair, without having any memories of experiences, which flash back on him, in the solitude of thought, as visions of entrancement? Why does one tourist talk only of hotels and dinners, another only of contracts and dollars, — and this in the vale of Tempé or in the presence of Niagara? Why does this man, competent in means, and in all his relations to life at ease, envy that man his larger house, his more extended grounds, his pictures, statues, books, above all, his more ample fortune? Has he not the palace of the sky? Has he not demesnes bounded only by the horizon? If he cannot afford pictures, he can have prints; casts, if he cannot have statues. A small sum of money will buy him more books than he can read; and, in having security of ease and comfort, he belongs to the small number of the elect in the present life. Why does this woman, with fair daughters, stout sons, and pleasant herself to look on, envy that woman-childless, it may be, and plain - her diamonds, her riches, and her position? And why does neither ever learn, or learn to love, what God has prepared everywhere in nature for the solace and the joy of his reasonable creatures? It is, however, a consolation to be aware that God's goodness in this respect is not in vain; the pervading beauty of creation is not wholly

lost on the most ignorant, the most insensible, the most neglectful, or the most ungrateful. It is none the less a divine manifestation; and, even where it is not perceived, it has still a divine result. I speak of the beautiful in nature with no sentimental rhapsody. I know that sunrise and sunset, surpassingly magnificent as they are, can excite no impassioned surprise; it is not desirable that they should: if the one cheerfully opens the day for duty and the other closes it in peace, if our hearts at intervals have rejoiced in their light, their splendor has not been to us in vain or lost. I know that rapture endures but for a moment, and that such moments are rare, even to natures the most susceptible; but, in the nature capable of the moment, the moment leaves effects that are imperishable. The effect of natural beauty, on those who sincerely love it, is not irritant or spasmodic: it is quick, deep, and durable; silent, not exclamatory; sympathetic, but not obtrusive; not transient with the occasion, but having, by means of thought and of association, inward and vital permanency. Such an influence of the beautiful is not temporary or convulsive, even in characters the most excitable; because it diffuses itself through the whole consciousness, and therefore does not so much disturb as tranquillize. Certain paroxysms, indeed, of the human soul, in darkness or in tempest, ally themselves with correspondent forces and phenomena in nature; but the expression of such feelings and analogies would, in real life, be exceptionally gloomy and terrible, and in poetry belongs only to the tragic. The influence of that which we distinctively call "the beautiful" in nature is all in the direction of inward peace; and, as it has most power in union with the qualities. which this peace includes, its tendency is to their development and growth.

Love of the beautiful in Nature - or, I may simply say, love of Nature-is good for the body and the mind. Good for the body, by winning it into exercise that is as healthy as it is pleasurable and pure; good for the mind, in all its faculties; good for the temper, by clearing the breast of all little and irritating excitement, and opening it to all bright and ex

panding influences; good for fancy, by enriching its chambers of imagery, and supplying them, by means of direct observation, with original and primitive analogies; good for intellect, by bracing and exhilarating it, and by drawing it for a while from the imprisonment of the library into the "glorious liberty" of the boundless universe; good for faith, by refreshing it with wholesome meditation, and by directing its attention away from the speculations of man to the works of God. The pleasures which spring from the love of nature are among the most elevated and the most blameless. The most refining, they are also the most accessible. They come from fair and glorious things; they cost no money; they are to be had everywhere; they are as wide as the presence and as the bounty of God; and they can fail us only from incapacity to enjoy them. But the capacity to enjoy them is in us all. It can be educated, it can be trained; and, in training it, we are training much of all in us that is best. For these pleasures consist in the activity of the purest faculties, enlarging the soul while their objects are present; and, when the objects are no longer cognizable by the senses, the ideas and the memories of them are still power in the soul.

In the soul it is that we have the source of our interest in nature; and nature will be alive to us only as the soul is active; will be grand to us only as the soul is noble. Sometimes our interest in nature is social; it implies companionship; it is associated with our domestic feelings, with our friendly regards, and with our festive pleasures. Phases of nature there are which we desire to see in connection with human habitations; phases which are complete only in the presence of human life. When grand views of nature are combined with the glory of magnificent cities, it is difficult to distinguish the sources of our pleasure, to say how much of it is derived from the situation, how much from the city, so intimately do the streams of enjoyment mingle. In looking down, for instance, on Edinburgh, from Calton Hill, the architectural majesty of the city and the natural splendor of scenery and situation melt into unity, and become one delight. Sometimes our interest in nature is historical. Spaces and

objects are impressive to us as they are localized by their relation to notable agents and memorable deeds. They are thus taken out of unmeasured nature and from common life. They are held as sacred, consecrated to piety or patriotism; or looked on as burned marks on the track of time, where mighty passions have left their footprints. Perhaps our profoundest interest in nature is solitary. Nature in its most stupendous objects cannot be disconnected from a sense of solitude. All ranges of mountains are thus lonely. They rise up from the deeps of uninhabitable grandeur, and hold no equal converse but with tempests and the heavens. The shout of thousands scarcely breaks their stillness. The hosts of Hannibal, or greater hosts than his, gave no social presence to the everlasting wilderness of the Alps. Look up to the firmament of a starry night, from the throng of a city, or from the waste of a desert; you are, while you gaze, alone with Infinity and your own soul. Whole multitudes of fleets would not disconnect our impression of the ocean from the idea of isolation. Surround Niagara with the masses of a city population, we yet should feel that its torrent is the child of the wilderness, and hear the voice of it as a lonely song from the depths of time. It is, however, in actual solitude that the love of nature is best proved, and that its grander aspects afford the sublimest pleasures.

Add science to sensibility, in a mind of wonderful grasp, logic, and imagination: we may then fancy the fulness of exalted pleasures which the life of Alexander Humboldt must have embraced, passed, as it was, in the contemplation of the universe, and in the study of its laws. With a genius equally beautiful and intellectual, equally descriptive and analytic, the man of science bloomed into the poet; but, both as man of science and as poet, he traces to the soul our interest in nature. After a general picture, in the opening portion of his "Kosmos," of some objects that he considers among the most striking of those which he remembered in his travels, he' observes, "All that the senses can but imperfectly comprehend, all that is most awful in such romantic scenes of nature, may become a source of enjoyment to a man, by opening a