THE ART OF NATURE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 403, 27 June 1908, Page 4

THE ART OF NATURE.

(BY A banker). With what lavish hand has all bounteous Nature adorned and embelished this fair earth of ours ! From a semi-molten void, without life, without colour, without any vestige of beauty, it has been transformed into a very fairy-land of rich and picturesque loveliness and ornate radiance. The firmament above, at dawn of day ornamented with wisps of vapour dyed a bright rose-pink; at noon, a vivid, brilliant azure, perhaps flecked with snow-white tufts of fantastically-shaped cloudlets ; at eve, on fire in a manyhued glory of carmine and gold, of emerald and atnathyst, and of mauve and deep sapphire, merging, as the shades of night draw on, into a rich violet, soon to fade away into the darkness. And, too, the ever inconstant ocean; now a brilliant blue, vying even with the azure of the skies; now a deep crystal green, its rippling wavelets sparkling like diamonds and fireopals ; or now a livid, jet-black, soon to be torn by tempest into a raging turmoil of foam-crested, curling billows.

And then how beautiful and attractive is the landscape, with all its varied attractions of hill and dale, snow-clad mountain and glacier, and purling river and flowery glen. As an instance, the picturesque flower-bedecked hills bordering the lovely 7 Sea of Galilee. Here a dell carpeted with a profusion of scarlet anemones and deep purple salvias, interspersed with tall spikes of cream-white asphodels or of purple acanthus ; here a wild rocky glen, rich in brilliant clumps of cyclamen, and deep blue lupin, or ranunculus of many colours ; or here perhaps a martagon lily, or a tuft of the rich scarlet adonis; while scattered about are handsome terebinth trees ; and at foot of the hill the blue waters of the ever-sacred lake glitter and sparkle. Surely the beauties of this iair earth cannot be surpassed in any of the seried array of planets throughout all the universes scatteted throughout the unfathomable depths of the illimitable void of space. In Mars, as an example, everything is apparently red —red earth, a blood-red sea, a red sky ; perhaps even, if a conjecture might be hazarded, red trees, red men and women, and red animals. And it this assumption be at all correct, how different to our manyhued adornments!

And surely it is fitting that the one orb amongst the entire serried array of the universes of God upon which the Creator of them all, leaving His rainbow-circled throne in the Heaven of Heavens, deigned to dwell for a time in order to make a great atonement for sin, should be the most beautiful of them all. But that vast realm, which must be the pivot of all those universes, far exceeds in beauty and in glory anything which the finite mind of mortal man is able to conceive. And it is the certain home of all who have in their earth-life conformed to His will, and who, pleading before the throne of God that substitutionary expiation of their sins, are accepted by Him, and made inheritors of that glory.