A MAN finds in the productions of Nature an inexhaustible stock of material upon which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence; and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the Sovereign Author of the universe. DR. JOHNSON. NATURE never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege Our cheerful faith that all which we behold WORDSWORTH. TURFY HAIR-GRASS. GRASSES that never knew a scythe, Wave all the summer long. THIS silken grass, these pleasant flowers in bloom, J LOVE at eventide, to walk alone, Down narrow lanes o'erhung with dewy thorn, drone, In vain, for flowers that bloom'd but newly there. CLARE. THE love of Nature serves to identify us with the happiness of that nature to which we belong; to give us an interest in every species of being which surrounds us, and amid the hours of curiosity and delight, to awaken those latent sympathies from which all the moral and intellectual greatness of man finally arises. ALISON. TREES and flowers and streams Are social and benevolent; and he Who oft communeth in their language pure, THUS I fix my firm belief, While rapture's gushing tears descend, R. BLOOMField. SCARLET PIMPERNEL, THE SHEPHERD'S WEATHER-GLASS. BRIGHTLY still the sun shines out, Hide us in celestial bower! E. ROBERTS. WHEN a man has succeeded at length in cultivating his imagination, all things, the most familiar and unnoticed, disclose charms invisible to him before; the contrast between the present and past, serving only to enhance and to endear so unlooked-for an acquisition. What Gray has finely said of the " pleasures of vicissitude," conveys but a faint image of what is experienced by the man who, after having lost in vulgar occupation and vulgar amusement his earliest and most precious years, is thus introduced at last to a new heaven and a new earth. "The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise." PROFESSOR STEWART. |