There are at least three distinct stages in men’s attitude towards the external world. First comes the unconscious love of children—of those at least whose home is in the country—for all rural things, for birds and beasts, for the trees and the fields. The next stage is that of youth and early manhood, which commonly gets so absorbed in trade, and business, politics, literature, or science,—that is, in the practical world of man, that the early caring for Nature disappears from the heart, perhaps never again to revisit it. The third and last stage is that of—some at least, perhaps of many—men, who, after much intercourse with the world, and after having, it may be, suffered in it, return to the calm, cool places of Nature, and find there a solace, a refreshment, something in harmony with their best thoughts, which they have not discovered in their youth, it may be because they then less needed it. Something like this takes place in the history of the race. Not to mention the savage state, men in the primeval era, when history first finds them, are affected by the visible world around them much as we see children and boys now are. Nature is almost everything to them. They use the forces, and receive the influences of it, if not in a wholly animal way, yet in a quite unconscious, unreflecting way. Then advancing civilization creates city life and affairs, in which man, with his material, social, and mental interests, takes the place of Nature, which then retires into the background. The love of it either wholly disappears or becomes a very subordinate matter. So it has been, so it still is, with whole populations, which know nothing beyond the purlieus of great cities. But probably the intensest feeling for Nature is that which is engendered out of the heart of the latest, perhaps over-refined, civilization. Ages that have been over-civilized turn away from their too highly-strung interests, their too feverish excitements, to find a peculiar relish in the calm, the coolness, the equability of Nature. Vinet has well said that “the more the soul has been cultivated by social intercourse, and especially the more it has suffered from it, the more, in short, society is disturbed and agonized, the more rich and profound Nature becomes,”—mysteriously eloquent for the one who comes to her from out the ardent and tumultuous centre of civilization.