nature's fruition in the creation of life forms, how untenable must appear the theory of accidental variation as a sufficient explanation of the growth and development of organisms! In any square rod of an old field life forms may arise simply out of the conditions. Spontaneous generation proved beyond question is the most desirable next achievement of science, in the interest of religion. It will demonstrate the spiritual identities of matter in all its forms. It will relieve the world's thought permanently of the implication that religion is simply a sentiment.

The world has given Mr. Darwin credit for being a master in finding out how living forms came to be as they are. It is not to his discredit that he did not see all the features of his problem, or all its consequences. He certainly did not have any intent towards that result of his patient labor which has become a splendid and enduring monument of his life work.

The old tradition was that man had dropped down into things. Darwin has shown that man himself is the product of natural law; that he has come up out of things and is the greatest of all growers; that he belongs to the universe and is neither a superior nor an alien.

CHAPTER VII.

NAKED NATURE.

NAKED nature-that is, its open, direct, and first contact with the mind and heart-has always been man's greatest teacher. The school of first impressions is life's school of absolute democracy. The savage, the child, the youth, the artist, the scholar make up a class of all sorts. On the same terms they get the same lessons in the same way. Scholarship has no advantage over childhood, except in its larger capacity of appreciation, because with the primary instincts external objects are to both etherealized. The smithies of wonder forge out much truth. All the poets and lovers and dreamers prefer to walk the open-eyed way of direct impressions-they wish to go to nature unafraid, as to an unbetraying mother, and they choose to woo and win rather than work with hammer and tongs.

"See, now I hold my heart against this tree;

The life that thrills its trembling leaves thrills me;
There is not a pleasure pulsing through its veins
That does not sting me with ecstatic pains;

No twig or tracery, however fine,
Can bear a tale of joy exceeding mine."

-Angela Morgan.

""T is not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,
Nor in the cup of budding flowers,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things,
There alway, alway, something sings."

-Emerson.

"To sit on rocks to muse o'er floods and feel,

To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal feet hath ne'er or rarely been,
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold,
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean-
This is not solitude."

"I have felt

-Byron.

A presence which disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns;
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects, of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things."

"To breathe the air, how delicious!

-Wordsworth.

To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand;

To be this incredible god, I am:

O amazement of things, even the least particle:

O spirituality of things."

-Whitman.

""T is but the unseen that grows not old nor dies,
Suffers not change, nor waning, nor decay,
This that we see, this casual glimpse within
The seething pit of space-these million stars
And worlds in making, these are nought but matter,
All are slaves to

That power immense, mysterious, intense,

Unseen as our own souls, but which must be

Like them in the theme of thought, with will and might
To stamp on mindless matter the soul's will."

-Gilder.

"Sometimes, in walking through a bit of woodland, one chances on a quiet and darkly serene pond; a pool amid the trees that looks small and shallow, that hardly draws the eye from the flickering sun and shade playing their immortal game of hide-and-seek over the tree trunks and through the shrubbery. Yet should one pause and look down into the brown water, one presently finds it a difficult matter to resume the tramp. The pool holds you; its gold reflections, its peace, its mysterious silence mean more from moment to moment. The woods you have been walking through are more beautiful seen through the revealing medium. There is the exquisite tracery of a fine bough against the blue sky, and a gleam of scarlet on yonder wayfaring trees, which you would have passed unnoticed; even a distant

cloud, rose-hued, telling of approaching evening. The pond brings nothing to you which you might not have seen for yourself, but as you see it now, through the clear beauty of its own observation, with an addition of tranquillity, in itself a beauty, it is no longer woods and leaves and clouds you see, but their spiritual effects." (Benson.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Samoan home, was habitually strung up to the out-of-door pitch. He always felt the incommunicable thrill of things. When he set out to clear the spaces about his house, the struggle of the grasses and the vines he uprooted went to his heart like supplications. And since his death the natives forbid the use of firearms on the hillside where his body is buried. They wish his spirit to enjoy the birds unmolested.

William Dean Howells, in his last visit to Oxford, found himself at a loss to keep in memory each renowned roof and minaret and spire. The May morning, the May air, the radiance of sunshine and flower held him fast. The "blurr of leafy luxuriance," the "foliage of green trees" so embowered the colleges that Gothic nave and stone-wrought transept became second to the insistence of flowery color everywhere in bloom. A