File:You and I; (1886) (14594517349).jpg

Identifier: youi00clev (find matches)
Title: You and I;
Year: 1886 (1880s)
Authors: Cleveland, Rose Elizabeth, 1846- (from old catalog)
Subjects: Etiquette Culture
Publisher: Detroit, Mich. (etc.) F. B. Dickerson & co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
ay or any way to the Infinite must bring the supernatural into our thought and life, and thenceforward (as Proctor has it) There is nothing to do but to bow the knee. The mere sentimentalist finds in nature only an echo of his own voice. He makes of her a nose of wax to be twisted into the image of his own fancies. Such men hear and see nothing of God in nature. Tympanum and retina are both preoccupied. As the Scotch say: Whas like our ain sels?Sentiment is not to be depreciated, and for its just use nature is prepared with inexhaustible store of parallels to human experiences and subtle correspondences with human moods;but sentimentalism simply imposes itself on nature and rarely finds anything, much less God. Those who take the com- THE J NFL UENCES OF NA TURE. 179 mercial view only see so many acres—woodland, upland orbottomland—with such and such capacities for grain or grazing. In the trees they see shade or merchantable timber.To the skies they never look except to keep the weather-
Text Appearing After Image:
as well as the higher half of its utility. The pride of possession comes in to distract the mind here, as that of intellect and feeling came to the others, and he is ready to say, Mybarns and my goods, with an emphasis which is apt to bring God upon the scene with a startling, Thou fool. See how the really religious suggestions of nature accept all that is true in each of these views and then go beyond. Mere science opens the scroll and describes the hieroglyphics,but the religious suggestion gives them a meaning, and the 180 YOU AND I. perplexing symbols reach their noblest meaning in causing our minds to touch the Divine Intelligence, and putting the hand of our weakness into that of Infinite Power. Mere sentimentalism tricks out nature in the tawdry gauds of half-unreal and half-wicked feelings, while the religious suggestions would present her with all possible power of sympathy, yet arrayed in the pure and dignified garb which artists always give to angels. The merely commercial view has

Note About Images