Page:Shakespeare in the Class-Room, Weld, Shakespeariana, October 1886.djvu/10

446 Why is this revelation in nature so radiant with glory? Why is it traced all over with lines of beauty and no other lines? Why but to attract mind to its contemplation, and thus illumine, dilate and develop it throughout! Has God made every tittle of nature a magnet to attract mind only to amuse it? drawing it to itself to give it nothing for coming there?

Nature is not a mere store-house of things, events, facts, entities, masses, atoms, and isolations, but an exhaustless fountain of principles, laws, causes and effects, fixed relations, affinities, combined elements, balanced forces, means and ends, processes, necessities and motives, and thus an infinite magazine of susceptibilities and powers, each a stimulus inciting the mind to clothe itself with beauty and strength.

Well doth it become us then, reverently to uncover in the presence-chamber of nature the earliest, divinely commissioned educator of man, the only one that begins to teach him at his birth, and provides that every moment shall bear to him a new lesson on its wings. In recounting the intellectual characteristics of the Bible, one of the most marked rarely receives its due. I mean its recognition every where of the fact that nature is a universal educator.

There is in our literature, but one book besides, that thus teems throughout with nature, and that is Shakespeare. Many other writers move us with her melodies, some with her grand harmonies, but Shakespeare alone sweeps the diapason of all nature's symphonies besides. In others, nature glows in the beauty of her leaf, bud and blossom, but in Shakespeare only, in all the wealth and glory of her golden fruitage too. Other writers represent nature while she sits passive, as her picture is sketched. In Shakespeare she paints her own portrait full-length, using his hand to hold her pencil, and guiding it with her own. Thus in Shakespeare we find the original of nature, in others but copies, often faint-lined. On every page of Shakespeare we find nature herself at home; not her proxy, her effigy, shadow, nor echo; not her attorney, consignee, nor man of all work; not even her minister plenopotentiary, nor premier, but her own very self, in her own dress, with her simple looks, artless ways and all unconscious air. There in free disport, all quick with life, she basks at full length in her own sunshine, ever humming her fancies as they come and go, now in frolic, now in battle, musing now, and now in tears, in ecstasy, in prayer, all in her own sweet way, and saying and doing all, only because she cannot help it, if she would, and would not help it if she could.

All honor to those educators who give high prominence to the sciences of nature in our schools; but shall we restrict our pupils to the study of nature's mere scientific ics, and ologies stiff with scholastic formulas? While doing all that we are doing in physics, (and much more may we do,) yet, let us never ignore the fact, that outside