Unity Pulpit Volume 7 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NATURE BROUGHT TO TOWN. "But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." ? Job xii., 7, 8. It is no easy thing to draw a satisfactory line between the natural and. the artificial. If you succeed in doing it in a way that is satisfactory to yourself, the first person you meet may dispute it. Pope tells us that " All nature is but art, unknown to thee." And Shakspere teaches us that Nature herself is the mother and teacher of all true art. And, whether it be in novel or drama, in painting or sculpture, we call that bad art which is not natural. Mr. Lowell's Parson Wilbur declares that " the best of all perfumes is just fresh air" and adds that this is what he " calls nature in writing." It is very hard to get at, he says; but, when you have once got it, you have got everything. That which is made by art, then, may be as natural, in the true sense of that word, as is anything that grows. The distinction, then, is a hard one to draw; and it is not necessary, for my present purpose, that I should enter into it with any fulness. We all feel it, and you will readily understand the points I wish to make. The most of us, for a longer or shorter time, during the past summer, have been face to face with Nature. We have been in the country, or amid the mountains, or by the sea. How much we have seen in the things we have looked athas depended largely upon ourselves. With profound insight, Mr. Lowell sings: ? " Thou seest no beauty save thou make it first: Man, woman, nature, each is but a glass In which man sees the image of himself." And a similar thought is in Shakspere: ? " The jewel that we find, we stoop a...