The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural Beauty

I have something to say which to old-fashioned geographers may appear very revolutionary, and which you may hesitate to accept straight away. But it has come to me as the result...

The Artist has now to stand back and view the forest as a whole. And he must test his view in the light of reason--bring Truth to bear upon Beauty. The forest with its multitudi...

The Artist is now in a position to take stock of Nature as a whole, of her nature, methods, and manner of working, of the motives which actuate her--of what, in short, she reall...

That Nature is a Personal Being--or at least nothing _less_ than a Personal Being--that she is actuated by an ideal, and that her ideal, so far as we are able to judge, is an id...

The Teesta Valley in its lowest part is only 700 feet above sea-level. It is deep and confined and saturated with perpetual moisture. Hardly a breath of wind stirs, and all plan...

So far we have paid attention almost exclusively to the plant life. But all through Sikkim the insect life presses itself just as insistently on our notice. In the tropical port...

The value of Knowledge and Character is duly impressed upon us. Of the value of Freedom we are told so much that we have come to regard it as an end in itself instead of only a...

The Artist in his quest for Natural Beauty will have pursued it in the remotest and wildest parts of the Earth, where he can see Nature in her primeval and most elemental simpli...

Aspiration is the root sentiment at the Heart of Nature as she manifests herself in the forest--aspiration upward checked by concentration upon the inmost centre. And the very e...

The remote glacier region gives us a sense of purity, and gives us, too, a vision of colour in its finest delicacy. But for depth, extent, and brilliancy of colour we must look...

If we have been right so far, we have arrived at the position that Nature is a Personal Being in process of realising an ideal operating within herself. We have now to satisfy o...

The Sikkim Himalaya is a region first brought prominently into notice by the writings of Sir Joseph Hooker, the great naturalist, who visited it in 1848. It lies immediately to...

From these scenes of tropical luxuriance and teeming life I would transport the Artist to a region of austerest beauty, far at the back of the Himalaya, where only one white man...

This great forest, which extends for hundreds of miles along the slopes of the Himalaya, reaches up from the plains to the snows. In the lower part it is a truly tropical forest...