"The Culture of aesthetic emotion, or delight in beautiful things, botany and natural history are unrivalled disciplines. I may recall the case which Ruskin mentions of the servant- girl who excused her non-demolition of the spider's web, because it was so pretty. Or again, I find in one of my grandfather's books a story of an enthusiastic lover of gardening, who left a fine nettle growing in his greenhouse, saying in excuse, " it grew up sae bonnily puir thing, that I could not think to pu' it." We often find the same feeling among country-folk, who say of cut flowers "Ah, but the're bonniest grown." In scores of little ways we can foster this delight in and reverence for beautiful things, without going to any extreme of high falutin' sentimentality. The antithesis is easily found, for instance, in ourselves when we carelessly decapitate plants with our walking stick . . . and from ourselves down to the rascals who set fire to cats or beat horses to death".

"If a man who had derived great happiness from the observation of nature were stricken with blindness or confined for the rest of his life to a sick-room, and if he were condemned to lose his recollection of all poets but one. Tennyson's is the poetry he should choose to keep. There, for example, he could follow the progress of spring from the beginning when

Once more the Heavenly Power

Makes all things new,

And domes the red-plowed hills

With loving blue;

when rosy plumelets tuft the larch, and a million emeralds break from the ruby- budded lime, and the ruddy- hearted blossom- flakes flutter down from the elm in tens of thousands; when the satin shining palms appear on sallows in the windy gleams, and, later, a gust strikes the yew and puffs the swaying branches into smoke, and all the wood stands in a mist of green, till, later still, as you cross the wood you pass through a green gloom.

Or, again, Tennyson will bring back to him the coming of the storm; its green malignant light near the horizon; then the ragged rims of thunder brooding low, with shadow-streaks of rain; and then the blasts that blow the poplar white and lash with storm the streaming pane; the stammering cracks and claps, the bellowing of the tempest, and at last the sounds of its retreat into the distance, moaning and calling out of other lands. 

Or, if he has loved the sea, with Tennyson he may still watch, on a windless day, the crisping ripples on the beach, and tender curving lines of creamy spray; or, on a windy one, crisp foam- flakes scudding along the level sand; or may recall from memories of the open sea a huge wave, greem- glimmering towards the summit, with all its stormy crests that smoke against the skies.

It will be just the same with him if he thinks of sunrise and sunset; of the nightingale or the thrush (whose voice has so become speech in The Throstle that, as he remembers it, he will laugh for amusement and joy); or of the mother- dog with her blind and shuddering puppies, or the rabbit fondling his own harmless face. 

And as our invalid lies awake through the night in his sick-room, he may remember Tennyson when the grandfather clocks in rooms beneath throb thunder through the floors, and may remember Tennyson again as the dawn approaches and the casement slowly grows a glimmering square".