Darwin enjoyed picturesque surroundings and novel experiences. He enjoyed the beauty of flowers, their color and shape. His son’s account of this is very charming: ‘I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the same simple admiration that a child might have.’[206] Occasionally, also, there are scattered hints which seem to suggest a deeper feeling. There is the description of the hour in Moor Park: ‘At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.’[207] Yet even here, ‘as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw,’ is the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth. There is the still intenser bit in the ‘Beagle’: ‘Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.’[208] And there is the striking touch in the early letter to Henslow: ‘The delight of sitting on a decaying trunk amidst the quiet gloom of the forest is unspeakable, and never to be forgotten,’[209] which at least suggests Obermann in the Forest of Fontainebleau. But these rare and scattered intimations serve only to bring out the different nature of the habitual attitude, and it is clear enough that such æsthetic element as there was gradually faded in the growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied that in the main Darwin’s interest in nature was intellectual, not emotional. IV As with sociology and with æsthetic experience, so, and even more, with God and the things of God, Darwin’s limitations are profoundly interesting, and if the loss was less, because there was less to lose, it was nevertheless, in all its aspects significant. Here again, as with æsthetic emotion, it must be remembered that men do not utter all they feel, and those who feel most sometimes utter least. But it so happens that circumstances obliged Darwin to be very explicit about his religious views and experiences, so that we are justified in assuming that we have access to pretty much all there was.