passing events shall awaken.  At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy.  And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of power, are put into his hands.”

It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of Wordsworth:—­

               “These beauteous forms,
  Through a long absence, have not been to me
  As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
  But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
  In hours of weariness sensations sweet
  Felt in the blood and felt along the heart.”

It is needless to quote the whole passage.  The poetry of Wordsworth may have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the comparison.

In Discipline, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.  Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp, because

“Time and space relations vanish as laws are known.”—­“The moral law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the circumference.”—­“All things with which we deal preach to us.  What is a farm but a mute gospel?”—­“From the child’s successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, ’Thy will be done!’ he is learning the secret that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character.”

The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to.  He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education.  When a friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with sweet and solid wisdom “it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.”  This thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles, which occurred a few months before “Nature” was published.  He had already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement.  “To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.  Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend.  The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.”  This was the first effect of the loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.

The chapter on Idealism must be read by all who believe themselves capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment of Turgot, which Emerson quotes:  “He that has never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries.”  The most essential statement is this:—­