But to leave these heights of inspired teaching, we find everywhere the more meditative poets deriving from visible Nature hints at that which eye has not seen nor ear heard. One of the simplest and most child-like instances of this that occurs to me is that beautiful thought of Isaac Walton:— “How joyed my heart in the rich melodies That overhead and round me did arise! The moving leaves—the waters’ gentle flow— Delicious music hung on every bough. Then said I, in my heart, If that the Lord Such lovely music on the earth accord; If to weak sinful man such sounds are given— Oh! what must be the melody of Heaven!” Something of the same thought comes out in a more reflective way in many of the poems of Henry Vaughan,[12] a writer of the same age as Walton, and one, like him, now less known and read than he deserves to be. Take the following, in which Vaughan speaks of the vivid insight of his childhood in a strain in which some have thought that they overheard the first note of that tone which Wordsworth has sounded more fully in his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality”. It is thus Vaughan speaks of his childhood:— “Happy those early days when I Shined in my angel-infancy; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short space, Could see a glimpse of _His_ bright face When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; And feel through all this fleshly dress Bright shootes of everlastingness.” Such thoughts may be deemed by some to be fanciful and not practical. Certainly they are not much in vogue at the present time. But as one has said, “I cannot conceive a use of our knowledge more practical than to make it connect the sight of this world with the thought of another.” Nor can any be more needed by us, or more consolatory. For is it not the experience of each individual as he grows more thoughtful, as well as the experience of the race, that the visible, the outward, cannot satisfy? Is it not the very best element in man that makes him feel forever after something higher, deeper, more enduring than the things he sees? If we turn aside from this tendency, and seek to quench it, we do so at the cost of destroying that which is the best, the noblest inheritance of our humanity,—the piece of divinity in us. This suggestive power of Nature, and its unsufficingness, have been felt by all men who have any glimpse of the ideal in them; by none has it been more deeply felt, or more adequately expressed, than by him, the great preacher—poet as well as preacher—of our age. I mean, Dr. Newman. As the prose words in which he expresses this feeling are in the highest sense poetry, I cannot, I think, do better than give the thought in his own perfect language. He is speaking in the opening of Spring:—