Nature is God’s Old Testament.—­Theodore Parker.

To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. 

          
                          —­Bryant.

Nature and wisdom never are at strife.—­Juvenal.

Those who devote themselves to the peaceful study of nature have but little temptation to launch out upon the tempestuous sea of ambition; they will scarcely be hurried away by the more violent or cruel passions, the ordinary failings of those ardent persons who do not control their conduct; but, pure as the objects of their researches, they will feel for everything about them the same benevolence which they see nature display toward all her productions.—­Cuvier.

“Behold the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet your heavenly Father careth for them.”  He expatiates on a single flower, and draws from it the delightful argument of confidence in God.  He gives us to see that taste may be combined with piety, and that the same heart may be occupied with all that is serious in the contemplations of religion, and be at the same time alive to the charms and the loveliness of nature.—­Dr. Chalmers.

Who loves not the shady trees,
The smell of flowers, the sound of brooks,
The song of birds, and the hum of bees,
Murmuring in green and fragrant nooks,
The voice of children in the spring,
Along the field-paths wandering? 
—­T.  Millar.

You will find something far greater in the woods than you will find in books.  Stones and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.—­St. Bernard.

Nobility.—­He who is lord of himself, and exists upon his own resources, is a noble but a rare being.—­Sir E. Brydges.

If a man be endued with a generous mind, this is the best kind of nobility.—­Plato.

A noble life crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.—­James A. Garfield.

Nature makes all the noblemen; wealth, education, or pedigree never made one yet.—­H.W.  Shaw.

Be noble! and the nobleness that lives
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own. 

          
                          —­Lowell.

Howe’er it be, it seems to me,
’Tis only noble to be good. 
—­Tennyson.

Obedience.—­The virtue of paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.—­Hare.