In the interpretation of individual life, the same principles hold; and nowhere can the imagination be more healthily and rewardingly occupied than in endeavouring to construct the life of an individual out of the fragments which are all that can reach us of the history of even the noblest of our race. How this will apply to the reading of the gospel story we leave to the earnest thought of our readers. We now pass to one more sphere in which the student imagination works in glad freedom--the sphere which is understood to belong more immediately to the poet. We have already said that the forms of Nature (by which word _forms_ we mean any of those conditions of Nature which affect the senses of man) are so many approximate representations of the mental conditions of humanity. The outward, commonly called the material, is _informed_ by, or has form in virtue of, the inward or immaterial--in a word, the thought. The forms of Nature are the representations of human thought in virtue of their being the embodiment of God’s thought. As such, therefore, they can be read and used to any depth, shallow or profound. Men of all ages and all developments have discovered in them the means of expression; and the men of ages to come, before us in every path along which we are now striving, must likewise find such means in those forms, unfolding with their unfolding necessities. The man, then, who, in harmony with nature, attempts the discovery of more of her meanings, is just searching out the things of God. The deepest of these are far too simple for us to understand as yet. But let our imagination interpretive reveal to us one severed significance of one of her parts, and such is the harmony of the whole, that all the realm of Nature is open to us henceforth--not without labour--and in time. Upon the man who can understand the human meaning of the snowdrop, of the primrose, or of the daisy, the life of the earth blossoming into the cosmical flower of a perfect moment will one day seize, possessing him with its prophetic hope, arousing his conscience with the vision of the “rest that remaineth,” and stirring up the aspiration to enter into that rest: “Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve! But long as godlike wish, or hope divine, Informs my spirit, ne’er can I believe That this magnificence is wholly thine! --From worlds not quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won; An intermingling of Heaven’s pomp is spread On ground which British shepherds tread!”