Nature is no less valuable to the imagination than sophistication; is indeed more necessary to us today than in the past, since most of us are surfeited with artifice. And this same nature arouses the most humane of faculties although it does so in the guise of the inhuman.
A webwork of branches coated by snow and viewed from a window above presents a sight so unusual it appears supernatural. It is a white webwork of preeminently organic form but in unaccustomed purity of hue. And that a natural thing should seem supernatural from one vantage although it was mundane from another is a lesson to art.
A small pool, perhaps forty feet across at its widest, coated with slime and moss, shallow but impenetrable to the eye, and closely hedged in by saplings and weeds, is by no means an allegory but is so suggestive in its distinctness as to be figurative of a host of other thoughts, which the mind in pursuing makes its own enlightenment and culture.
The noises beside a pond at night are so various, imitative of voice and laughter, suggestive of arcane activities, or such seeming signals of concert to spiritual action, that the listener is tempted to look for the face or gate that they betoken.
The mystic summer whisper of the katydid is itself a signal, expressive in its ebb and flow, though the listener knows not of what, and impresses itself keenly upon the hearer as the sense of something elsewhere and inviting.
The simple depths of the hills’ interspaces, with their darkness and thick growth of ferns, give an image to a thousand other recesses, shades, falls, lulls, intervals, and omissions—and associates itself in the minds of the thoughtful with remote events and eras of consciousness.
And the afternoon storm of blackened clouds and distant thunder, giving way to rain, roaring blasts, and hideous stabs of lightning—is it not like cloudless storms seen elsewhere? Does it not have in it all the picturing of a mind, a house, a street, a nation—is it not the picture of a multitude of things, and more perfect than all since standing for all and most inarticulately itself?
The world of men might know nothing but the most menial and verifiable of facts. But there are hints of larger truths in those things not taught guile to conceal their nature, in the mere objects of physical existence which present through their images the image of ourselves, since they are most constrained by nature to speak of the world that bred us.
The window beside me (which cannot be fastened) falls open now and then with the pressure of the colder air outside, and draws my attention by the low and restless sound of the wind, no less than by the draft that invades the room. Nature, beside its mysteries and enlightments, is an insistent creature, and better to hear at leisure than at need. To some, this is a point that will address itself to purely practical concerns. But it is worth considering that imagination, too, has need of nature which, being neglected, must later force itself and execute its regulations at last where they were so willfully forgotten.
