He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the moving tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices of spring-time and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, received the first distinct religious impressions that he remembered. His nature, which seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity to the rules of syntax and the answers in the Westminster Catechism, was wide open and receptive to all the processes and influences of nature around him. He drank them in, and they became not only a vast storehouse of facts and images to which he resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even more than that, a very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared in his sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, in whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose leaves he had listened in boyhood. The spring which so often served in illustrating spiritual truths was but the description of those that burst out from the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect Hill, and the flowers so frequently referred to in the pulpit or in private conversation were such as he had grown familiar with by the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of his country home. The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the fields of Litchfield, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its mornings and the gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the lake, its wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets hidden away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the ruggedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins of its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and buttercup, the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle of its brooks, the song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twilight, the gentle breathings of its August winds and the fierce rattle of its December storms, were all absorbed by his receptive nature and continually reappeared in his writings and talk of after-years. They added the grace and beauty native to them to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in part the secret of that charm in his words which attached and interested all alike. They did more than this: they prepared him to be an interpreter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we shall see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a material science. It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God’s beautiful provisions, that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, where there is more of nature to the square foot, as we believe, than in any other place on the globe; to learn his first lessons in the beautiful school of her flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, pasture lands, hill-tops, and forests.