Here, as in more
secluded and quiet places. Nature confides to those who love her some
deep and precious truths never to be put into words, but ever after to
rise at times over the horizon of thought like vagrant ships that come
and go against the distant sea line, or like clouds that pass along the
remotest circle of the sky as it sleeps upon the hills. The essence of
play is the unconscious overflow of life that seeks escape in perfect
self-forgetfulness. There is no effort in it, no whip of the will
driving the unwilling energies to an activity from which they shrink;
one plays as the bird sings and the brook runs and the sun shines--not
with conscious purpose, but from the simple overflow. In this sense
Nature never works, she is always at play. In perfect unconsciousness,
without friction or effort, her mightiest movements are made and her
sublimest tasks accomplished. Throughout the whole range of her
activity one never comes upon any trace of effort, any sign of
weariness; one is always impressed--as Ruskin said long ago of works of
genius--that he is standing in the presence, not of a great effort, but
of a great power; that what has been done is only a single
manifestation of the play of an inexhaustible force. There is
somewhere in the universe an infinite fountain of life and beauty which
overflows and floods all worlds with divine energy and loveliness.
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