of my mind. Nature is more than a Tast congeries of physical facts, related to each other as cause and effect, and signifying nothing else." "What is signified, then, in your theory ?" "I have no theory. I have an irregular and fitful conviction that there are great truths of the aflfections seeking an inlet upon men, which flow fix>m God, and which reach men, rightly sensitive, through the doings and appearances of what we call Nature." " Pray, give me an inkling. Doctor ; for if you can get more from nature than I do,j perhaps you can teach me how to help myself in the same way." " Look at Eose, Dr. Buell, with her hand full of dandelions. Don't you see that a beam of sun- light has struck through the leaves, and is pouring gold on the child's head? See her wink, and puzzle, the darling I " " What does that sunlight mean to her ? " "Nothing, except to her skin; and there it means trouble and annoyance. But to you and to me it means beauty. It lies speckling all the ground around her. It moves with the leaves as VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. 103 if it had a life of its own. It kindles beauty out of homeliness itself if it but touches it." ** What then?" ** There is more meaning in sunlight than a child knows, or can know." "More meaning? That is, I suppose, there are effects which the child does not notice or appreciate." " Do you believe that the sunlight can produce any effect not provided for in its original constitu- tion? Tou believe that God created it. Did He not know and design every element, and every effect?" " Surely : surely I believe it." **0f course you believe it, in a general and abstract manner. Look through these evergreens! See that clump of hollyhocks, white on yellow, and rose on crimson, so they stand, and the light &lls on them alone, through that opemng among the trees. They are transfigured I The light seems to palpitate upon them, and on the crimson blossom it fairly trembles! Is that all mere materiality ? Is there no moral around them ? " " Tou don't mean that a hollyhock is a moral and accountable being? It is an unreasoning 104 NORWOOD; OR, and unconscious thing, acted upon, but not acting." " Hold 1 Does it not act ? Does it not send sheets of light to my eyes ? Does not that raise up a thousand fancies and yearnings ? Do I not, in its exquisite effects, almost see through matter, and into the other life ? And is not that clump, with its atmosphere of light, the instrument pro- ducing such effects? And when God created light and flowers, did He not know what power it was possible that they could exert upon human souls, and design that they should do it ? They have a moral function, even if they have no moral naiure ! " "I understand you. Doctor. You hold that there are two kinds of moral agents one con- scious and voluntary, and the other unconscious and involuntary. But how many do you suppose in this town, besides yourself, ever saw or thought of such things in a hollyhock bush ? It is mere fancy. It is not sober fact." ** Fancy is itself a fact, just as much as in argu- ment, a leaf, or a stone. God made the soul to be played upon by its fellows, by the whole round of visible nature, by invisible things, and more than VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. 105 ally by Himself. If shaking leaves stir up the soul, there was a power in them to do it, as much as in the soul to be agitated. I insist on a living. Divine power in physical things. Why should men be so anxious to degrade nature? Is it unsafe to believe that God's eye follows every sparrow, and that EUs taste unrolls every flower, and that His feelings have an alphabetic expres- sion in all natural forms, harmonies, colours, contrasts, and affinities." " But if this were so, would there be so few even of educated men who derived any influence from those things ? " ** I will answer you by asking. If the Bible is God's word, declaring His counsel, as we both believe, would there, out of ten hundred million people on the globe, be less probably than a hundred million that derive a single influence fix)m it ? In both cases eyes have they, but they see not" For a long time Dr. Buell sat silent and thoughtful. Had it been a logical statement or the true meaning of a line of Scriptural texts, he would have been full of resources of argument. But, deficient in imagination, and trained to 106 NORWOOD; OR, reject it in all investigations as an element of error, he yet could not but perceive that Dr. Wentworth, by its ministration, found in nature a ground for religious faith which he did not, while at the same time he reverently accepted and eminently exemplified the teachings of the New Testament. He rose and walked for a few moments along the edges of the shadow, where the gold sunlight and the leaf-shadows played a game of reprisals, back and forth, taking and retaking the ground from each other with noiseless conflict, until he had compassed the circuit of the great elm. "Doctor, there may be something in your views. When you state them they strike me as having substance ; but when I attempt of myself to think of them, they melt in my hands. When you say that natural objects have moral ends, you do not mean that they constitute a part of the commands, motives, and intelligent duties included in moral government ? " " I surely believe that they supplement these things. Physical laws are Divine commands, and so far they are a part of moral government Whatever affects a man's soul is, for the time VIIJLAGB LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. 107 being, a moral influence. The advent of Christ may be a more augast and inmiensely more fruit- fill influence than the breaking forth of a lily from the ground ; but when our Saviour said, * Behold the lilies ! ' lilies were ordained to act a part in morals." " Do you think that a flower, in and of itself, has any moral meaning." ** Do you think that words, in and of themselves, have any signification? Words mean whatever they have the power to make us think of when we look on them. Flowers mean what sentiment they have the power to produce in us. The image which a flower casts upon a sensitive plate is simply its own self-form ; but, cast upon a more sensitive human soul, it leaves there not mere form, but feeling, excitement, suggestion. God gave it power to do that, or it would not have done it." "Is not this mysticism. Doctor, rather than common sense? I confess that I perceive in plants a relation to matter, to my senses, and to practical uses; but when you make them preach or teach, or do duty as moralists, un- less you mean it in a metaphorical way, I am puzzled." 108 NORWOOD; OB, "Yonder is my bed of hyacinths, now out of blossom, and filled up between their rows are my tiger flowers, yellow and red, every day and all summer blossoming, or they wovM blossom if the moles did not eat up the bulbs at such a fearful rate! These underground radicals! you can hardly rid a garden of them when once they become numerous and neighbourly. No matter about that What I was going to say was, that I consider a mole's opinion of the structures and uses of my hyacinths to be very much like well, excuse me, ^like most folk's notions of moral tmtL The moles see the bottom and nothing else. Imagine a mole forming a philosophical theory of my bulbs ? In mole's language, what- ever that is, he would say: *A hyacinth is a vegetable creation put under ground for the benefit of moles. It is round, of a sweetish taste, quite juicy, and wholesome for moles. It has been held by some moles that a hyacinth has an existence above ground, and speculatists have gone so far as to say that this root is only a kind of starting point, while the best part of the plant is above ground. But there is no evidence of that, and it is doubtless a vagary of the imagination.' " VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. 109 The minister could not help laughing at this able. " 1 admit so much of this," said he, " that truths may have only their bulbs in this world, and their stems and blossoms higher up ; but, even so, how are we to know anything about these fragrant blossoms if they are in another medium, and above our reach or investigation ? " "The first step toward knowing is to be con- scious of not knowing. If truth can be suflSciently learned through our senses, we shall take no further pains, and be content with a little, as if it were the whole.*' " But ftdmit, Doctor, that nature is full of some hidden meanings, as you call them, how will you detect them ? How will you distinguish between a mere fancy and a substantial reality ? " "Is a thought necessarily any truer than an imagination? Is a thought anything but the impression produced upon a faculty by a certain kind of truth ? Is not an imagination the impres- sion produced upon another faculty by another kind of truth ? Is not sight as much a sensation as hearing ? And is not the report of one faculty to be taken for truth, each in it3 kind, as much as of another ? It takes five senses to report to us all 110 nobwood; ob^ the qualities of matter. It takes twice as many mental feculties to determine all the properties and relations of a truth. Knowledge is (like "white light) that condition of mind which is pro- duced at the point where all the faculties on which a truth falls join their reports." "And so you would regard the imagination as needful to a scientific investigation ? " **No man without imagination can by any possibility be an acute observer, nor a sound reasoner even upon physical facts, still less upon truths which involve some mental qualities ? " "Do you think, then, that poets are our best philosophers, theologians, legists, and savans ? " "There is scarcely a great poet who would not have been eminent as philosopher or theo- logian. There is not one theologian or philo- sopher in history who had not in him the elements of a poet And he is indebted for fame to those very elements of poetry. His special dogmas may have perished from out of men's belief. But the great truths of emotion, expressed with poetic feeling, live on. This is the universal and im- mortal part. No man can express the great truths of human life without employing all his moral and YILLAGE LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. Ill 8BSthetic nature. No man ever delivers great truths worthily without rising into eloquence and even into poetry." " What do you understand to be the diflference between prose, eloquence, and poetry ? " " Prose is the work-day df ess in which truths do secular duty. Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its Divine origin. Prose is truth looking on the ground: eloquence is truth looking up to heaven. Poetry is truth flying up- ward toward God ! " " Tour version is itself poetic, but not philoso- phical. Tou give me a picture, not a discrimina- tion and definition." " Well, common prose is the language of the intellectual faculties, acting with ideality. When you add the fire and figures which the imagination inspires, it is eloquence. K now you give it musical qualities, in time, flow, and rhyme, it is poetry. Or, again, when human truths are spoken as they exist in their physical relations, that is prose, science, or whatever you choose to call it. Add now the element of inspiration, raise the same truths into the light of those faculties which are distinctively spiritual and Divine, and you have 112 NORWOOD; OB, poetry, and this is the highest form of good sense, or reason in its nobler sphere." " Apply this criticism. Doctor, to your notions of flowers and scenery." " It scarcely needs it. It is not poetry to say that that part of universal life which belongs to the yegetable kingdom has a moral relation to human beings, proved by the effects which it has shown itself capable of producing on fine natures, and for which, it is strictly philosophical to infer they were adapted. That so few perceive it, or experience it consciously, is no more a presump- tion against its nature and proper uses than the indifference of mankind to the movements of the planets as evidence that our seasons do not arise from stellar revolutions." " Doctor, I cannot fairly say that I believe your notions