I have spoken hitherto of nature as she appears; to the unruffled, the perceptive mind; but let us further consider what relation nature can bear to the burdened heart and the overshadowed mood.  Is there indeed a vis medicatrix in nature which can heal our grief and console our anxieties?  “The country for a wounded heart” says the old proverb.  Is that indeed true?  I am here inclined to part company with wise men and poets who have spoken and sung of the consoling power of nature.  I think it is not so.  It is true that anything which we love very deeply has a certain power of distracting the mind.  But I think there is no greater agony than to be confronted with tranquil passionate beauty, when the heart and spirit are out of tune with it.  In the days of one’s joy, nature laughs with us; in the days of vague and fantastic melancholy, there is an air of wistfulness, of mystery, that ministers to our luxurious sadness.  But when one bears about the heavy burden of a harassing anxiety of sorrow, then the smile on the face of nature has something poisonous, almost maddening about it.  It breeds an emotion that is like the rage of Othello when he looks upon the face of Desdemona, and believes her false.  Nature has no sympathy, no pity.  She has her work to do, and the swift and bright process goes on; she casts her failures aside with merciless glee; she seems to say to men oppressed by sorrow and sickness, “This is no world for you; rejoice and make merry, or I have no need of you.”  In a far-off way, indeed, the gentle beauty of nature may help a sad heart, by seeming to assure one that the mind of God is set upon what is fair and sweet; but neither God nor nature seems to have any direct message to the stricken heart.

    “Not till the fire is dying in the grate
     Look we for any kinship with the stars,”

says a subtle poet; and such comfort as nature can give is not the direct comfort of sympathy and tenderness, but only the comfort that can be resolutely distilled from the contemplation of nature by man’s indomitable spirit.  For nature tends to replace rather than to heal; and the sadness of life consists for most of us in the irreplaceableness of the things we love and lose.  The lesson is a hard one, that “Nature tolerates, she does not need.”  Let us only be sure that it is a true one, for nothing but the truth can give us ultimate repose.  To the youthful spirit it is different, for all that the young and ardent need is that, if the old fails them, some new delight should be substituted.  They but desire that the truth should be hidden from their gaze; as in the childish stories, when the hero and heroine have been safely piloted through danger and brought into prosperity, the door is closed with a snap.  “They lived happily ever afterwards.”  But the older spirit knows that the “ever” must be deleted, makes question of the “afterwards,” and looks through to the old age of bereavement and sorrow, when the two must again be parted.