You never shed a tear, or create a beautiful image, or quiver with emotion, but you pay for it at the practical, calculating end of your nature.

You have just so much force: when the one channel runs over the other runs dry.
And now we turn to Nature.

All these years we have lived beside her, and we have never seen her; and now we open our eyes and look at her.
The rocks have been to us a blur of brown: we bend over them, and the disorganised masses dissolve into a many-coloured, many-shaped, carefully-arranged form of existence.

Here masses of rainbow-tinted crystals, half-fused together; there bands of smooth grey and red methodically overlying each other.

This rock here is covered with a delicate silver tracery, in some mineral, resembling leaves and branches; there on the flat stone, on which we so often have sat to weep and pray, we look down, and see it covered with the fossil footprints of great birds, and the beautiful skeleton of a fish.