Extracts
From the Book of Nature
Selected from the Summer 2008 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind”; and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind; and God saw that it was good.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? —William Blake, 1794
Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Savior rode.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836
Once beyond the threshold of the city, we must turn to Nature in order to live.
—Paul Gauguin, c. 1891
Daily they grow, and daily forth are sent Into the world, it to replenish more; Yet is the stock not lessenèd nor spent, But still remains in everlasting store As it at first created was of yore: For in the wide womb of the world there lies In hateful darkness and in deep horrór An huge eternal Chaos, which supplies The substances of Nature’s fruitful progenies. —Edmund Spenser, 1590
For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.
—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893
The whole earth is the Lord’s garden & He hath given it to the Sonnes of men with a general Commission.
—John Winthrop, c. 1628
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs, Losing both beauty and utility. And all our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges, Defective in their natures, grow to wildness. —William Shakespeare, 1623
Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude—over those soft heaps of the decaying tree trunks and through the swampy places, green with water moss—and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It has been a wilderness from the creation. Must it not be a wilderness forever?
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1849
All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, “whatever is, is right.” —Alexander Pope, 1734
Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities!
—Walt Whitman, 1865
That which is most unnatural is still Nature; the stupidest philistinism has a touch of her genius. Whoso cannot see her everywhere, sees her nowhere rightly.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1783
By the ancients, man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed, because inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that of the earth.
—Leonardo da Vinci, 1492
Men are like plants: the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.
—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, 1782
For Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
—Isaac Newton, 1687
My Splendors, are Menagerie— But their Competeless Show Will entertain the Centuries When I, am long ago, An Island in dishonored Grass— Whom none but Beetles—know. —Emily Dickinson, c. 1861
And when the day of his age sinks toward the west, as decay now announces the evening of life, the wintry frost of old age makes him grow white with its rime.
—Alain de Lille, c. 1170
God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.
—Pseudo-Martin Luther, 1539
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
—John Muir, 1912
If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! —William Wordsworth, 1798
But as what is well designed to nourish the body and enliven the spirits through the stomach makes a dinner a dinner, so what is well designed to recreate the mind from urban oppressions through the eye makes the park the park. All other elements of it are simply accessories of these essentials.
—Frederick Law Olmsted, 1872
We have gotten past the stage, my fellow citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1903
And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
—Charles Darwin, 1859
There is no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other’s means of subsistence.
—Thomas Malthus, 1803
The study of nature makes a man at last as remorseless as nature.
—H.G. Wells, 1896
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818
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BOOK OF NATURE
Summer 2008
Good stuff