But “a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of Beauty” which is his next subject.  There are some touches of description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and impressions for pictures.

Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be found here.  Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature.  “What is common to them all,—­that perfectness and harmony, is beauty.”—­“Nothing is quite beautiful alone:  nothing but is beautiful in the whole.”—­“No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty.”  How easily these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems, “Each and All,” and “The Rhodora.”  A good deal of his philosophy comes out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:—­

“Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for the universe; God is the all-fair.  Truth and goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same All.  But beauty in Nature is not ultimate.  It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good.  It must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of Nature.”.

In the “Rhodora” the flower is made to answer that

  “Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper than itself.

He passes next to a consideration of Language.  Words are signs of natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit.  Without going very profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in which languages are formed,—­whence words are derived, how they become transformed and worn out.  But they come at first fresh from Nature.

“A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.  Hence good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.”

From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material images.  They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves when great exigencies call for them.

“The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed,—­shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics.  Long hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,—­in the hour of revolution,—­these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the