“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 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