it was in the nature of things to appear in images—royalty in lions and kings, strength in bulls and heroes, industriousness in ants and beavers, delicacy in butterflies and fawns, terror in oceans and thunder, glory in roses and sunsets

  

All Nature Has a Feeling

 by John Clare

 (1845)

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks

Are life eternal: and in silence they

Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;

There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay

Is the green life of change; to pass away

And come again in blooms revivified.

Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,

And with the sun and moon shall still abide

Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

...........

Alexis de Tocqueville: “The soil is punctured in a thousand places by primitive rocks sticking out here and there like the bones of a skeleton, like a fertile field covered by the ruins of some vast structure...

Here, as in the forest tamed by man, death was striking constantly, but it was no man’s duty to remove the resulting debris, which piled up faster than time could reduce it to powder and make room for new growth. New growth, however, was constantly forcing its way through this debris, with creepers and plants of every sort struggling toward the light, climbing along fallen trunks and into the rotting wood, lifting the cracking bark, and opening the way for their young shoots. Thus death in some way helped life forward, as face to face they seemed to wish to mingle and confuse their functions.”

.............

“The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. That is, to the darkened mind it did not mean nothing that the sun went down and night came and the moon and stars appeared and then dawn and the sun and morning again and another day, which would itself wax and then wane into twilight and dusk and night. It did not mean nothing to them that the time of work was under the aegis of the bright sun and that it was the sun that poured life into the seeds that they were planting and that brought out the sweat on their foreheads, and that the time of rest was under the scepter of the silver moon. This was the diurnal exhibition of what was True—that there are a panoply and a rhythm and a cycle, a waxing and a waning, a rising and a setting and then a rising again...

The former mind, in a word, read vast significance into everything. Nature and politics and animals and sex—these were all exhibitions in their own way of the way things are. This mind fancied that everything meant everything, and that it all rushed up finally to heaven. We have an idea of royalty, this mind said, which we observe in our politics and which we attribute to lions and eagles, and we have this idea because there is a great King at the top of things, and he has set things thus so that our fancies will be drawn toward his royal Person, and we will recognize the hard realities of which the stuff of our world has been a poor shadow when we stumble into his royal court. So this mind handled all the data of experience as though they were images—cases in point, that is, of each other and of the way things are. So that when they came across the idea, say, of the incarnation of the god, it made perfect sense to them, since it was in the nature of things to appear in images—royalty in lions and kings, strength in bulls and heroes, industriousness in ants and beavers, delicacy in butterflies and fawns, terror in oceans and thunder, glory in roses and sunsets—so of course the god might appear in flesh and blood, how else? And when they heard about a thing like resurrection, they could believe it, since they thought they could see the same thing (life issuing from death) in other realms—seedtime and harvest, and morning and evening, and renunciation and reward—and so what else did it all mean but that it is the way things are that life triumphs over death?”

Thomas Howard

"And [the Passion of the Cross’] vitality comes from the very things that its foes find a scandal and a stumbling-block; from its dogmatism and from its dreadfulness. It lives, because it involves the staggering story of the Creator truly groaning and travailing with his Creation; and the highest thing thinkable passing through some nadir of the lowest curve of the cosmos. And it lives, because the very blast from this black cloud of death comes upon the world as a wind of everlasting life; by which all things wake and are alive.”

G.K. Chesterton, from The Way of the Cross