That narrow
foot-path led to civilisation, and has broadened into the highway
because human fellowships and needs have multiplied and directed the
countless feet that have beaten it into permanency. Every new highway
has been a new bond between Nature and men, a new evidence of that
indissoluble fellowship into which they are forever united.
I have sometimes tried to recall in imagination the world of Nature
before a human voice had broken the silence or a human foot left its
impress on the soil; but when I remember that what I see in this sweep
of force and beauty is largely what I myself put into the vision, that
Nature without the human ear is soundless, and without the human eye
colourless, I understand that what lies spread before me never was
until a human soul confronted it and became its interpreter. This
radiant world upon which I look was without form and void until the
earliest man brought to the vision of it that creative power within
himself which touched it with form and colour and relations not its
own. Nature is as incomplete and helpless without man as man would be
without Nature. He brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, and
clothed her with a garment woven on we know not what looms of divine
energy; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened him for the life which
lay before him.
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