The Art of Nature.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43337, 13 June 1908, Page 2

The Art of Nature.

(by a banker)

With what lavish hand has all-bounteous Nature adorned and embellished 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 many-hued glory of earmiue and gold, of emerald and amethyst, 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 fire-opals ; or now a livid, jet-black, soon to be tom by tempest into a raging turmoil of foam-crested, curling billows.

And then bow 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 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 hero nerhans a martasron 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 fair earth cannot be surpassed in any of the serried array of planots throughout all the universes scattered 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 ipen and women, . and red animals, And if this assumption be at all correct, how different to our manybued 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 rainbowcircled throne in the heaven of heavens, deigned to dwell for a time in order to make a groat Atonement for sin, should be the most beautiful of thorn all, But that vast Realm, which must be the

Pivot of all those universes, fur exceeds in beauty and in glory anything which the finite mind of moral man is able to conceive. And it is the certain home of all who have in their' earth-life conformed to His will, and wh°, pleading before the throne of God that substitutionary expiation of their sins, are accepted by Him, and made inheritors of that glory, ;