There are three methods of contemplating nature. These are the material, the shadowy, and the mediatorial. The materialist looks upon it as the great and only reality. It is a vast solid fact, for ever burning and rolling around, below and above him. The idealist, on the contrary, regards it as a shadow—a mode of mind—the infinite projection of his own thought. The man who stands _between_ the two extremes, looks on nature as a great, but not ultimate or everlasting scheme of mediation, or compromise, between pure and absolute spirit and humanity—adumbrating God to man, and bringing man near to God. To the materialist, there is an altar, star-lighted heaven-high, but no God. To the idealist, there is a God, but no altar. He who holds the theory of mediation, has the Great Spirit as his God, and the universe as the altar on which he presents the gift of his poetical (we do not speak at present so much of his theological) adoration. It must be obvious, at once, which of those three views of nature is the most poetical. It is surely that which keeps the two principles of spirit and matter distinct and unconfounded—preserves in their proper relations—the soul and the body of things—God within, and without the garment by which, in Goethe’s grand thought, “we see him by.” While one party deify, and another destroy matter, the third impregnate, without identifying it with the Divine presence. The notions suggested by this view, which is that of Scripture, are exceedingly comprehensive and magnificent. Nature becomes to the poet’s eye “_a great sheet let down from God out of heaven_,” and in which there is no object “common or unclean.” The purpose and the Being above cast such a grandeur over the pettiest or barest objects, as did the fiery pillar upon the sand, or the shrubs of the howling desert of its march. Every thing becomes valuable when looked upon as a communication from God, imperfect only from the nature of the material used. What otherwise might have been concluded discords, now appear only stammerings or whisperings in the Divine voice; thorns and thistles spring above the primeval curse, the “meanest flower that blows” gives “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an embassador from the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association—that of a divine and perpetual presence—is shed over the landscape, and its golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse—the cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse, and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting blood—are all clothed in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree— “A light which never was on sea or shore.”