Vanishing Roads and Other Essays | Page 4

at all events, as it thus clearly
appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree, alike
dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the thoughts
that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like stirrings of
his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him before the
beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of Nature
within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say, a
belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as
apple-blossom of the apple?
If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation of
her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her
varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation
through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe.
The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid
pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike
dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only
come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all
things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the sunset, or
flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or whispers in the

sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself in mountain-range
and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, dreams in still waters,
nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs its great green laugh
in the wide sincerity of the grass.
As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so endlessly
varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest moments
they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as though
the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the universe is
revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of rising at
dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the sun, he
would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be hallowed
for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of the
largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems to
be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from fountains
of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights we feel
that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them on our
knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in thought
the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that we so
seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the best
kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some day it
will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the white feet
of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across the sea.
This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity in our
Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how
much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our
moods.
Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed
in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as
we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that
has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies
opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound
thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to
gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives, we
feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into a
world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life,

whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind
at large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to
scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the
American traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such
natural spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an
intense reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's
heart instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any
violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same feeling
as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish violation of
the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather than decrease
in proportion as religion is recognized as having its shrines and oracles
not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but wherever Nature has erected
her altars on the hills or wafted her incense through the woodlands.
After all, are