So live, that when thy summons comes to join
  The innumerable caravan, which moves
  To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
  His chamber in the silent halls of death,
  Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
  Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
  By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
  Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
  About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

NATURE’S MINISTRY OF BEAUTY.

[From Nature.]

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.  Most persons do not see the sun.  At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.  The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food.  In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.  Nature says, He is my creature, and mauger all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me.  Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.  Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.  In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.  Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the brink of fear.  In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.  In the woods is perpetual youth.  Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reigns, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.  In the woods we return to reason and faith.  There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—­no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.  Standing on the bare ground—­my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—­all mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.  The name of the nearest friend sounds there foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances—­master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.  I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.  In the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages.  In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.