The misery of man appears like childish petulance when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens.  All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man.  The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapour to the field; the ice on the other side of the planet condenses the rain on this; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man of the same natural benefactors.  The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him.  He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write all that happens for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs.

III.—­HER LOVELINESS

A nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of beauty.  Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves, a pleasure arising from art, line, colour, motion, and grouping.  This seems partly owing to the eye itself.  The eye is the best of artists, as light is the first of painters.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company Nature is medicinal, and restores their tone.  But in other hours Nature satisfies by her loveliness and without any mixture of corporeal benefit.  I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house from daybreak to sunrise with emotion which an angel might share.  How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements.  Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.  The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year.  To the attentive eye each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields it beholds every hour a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Every rational creature has all Nature for his dowry and estate.  He may divest himself of it, he may creep into a corner and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.  In proportion to the energy of his thought and will he takes up the world into himself.

IV.—­HER GIFT OF LANGUAGE

Language is another use which Nature subserves to man.  Words are signs of natural facts.  The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history.  Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.  Right means straight; wrong means twisted; transgression the crossing of a line.  Most of the process by which this transformation is made is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children.