" To illustrate it
still further. You are walking in the woods, and you find the first
primrose of the year. You feel almost as if you had found a child. You
know in yourself that you have found a new beauty and a new joy, though
you have seen it a thousand times before. It is a primrose. A little
flower that looks at me, thinks itself into my heart, and gives me a
pleasure distinct in itself, and which I feel as if I could not do
without. The impassioned expression on the face of this little outspread
flower is its childhood; it means trust, consciousness of protection,
faith, and hope. Science, in the person of the botanist, comes after
you, and pulls it to pieces to see its construction, and delights the
intellect; but the science itself is dead, and kills what it touches.
The flower exists not for it, but for the expression on its face, which
is its poetry,--that expression which you feel to mean a living thing;
that expression which makes you feel that this flower is, as it were,
just growing out of the heart of God. The intellect itself is but the
scaffolding for the uprearing of the spiritual nature.
It will make all this yet plainer, if you can suppose a human form to be
created without a soul in it.
Pages:
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325