Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer

this world was all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he touches he taints. In thought he moralizes. One would think that no free, joyful labor was possible to him. How infinite and pure the least pleasure of which Nature is basis, compared with the congratulation of mankind! The joy which Nature yields is like that afforded by the frank words of one we love.²⁵⁵

      This idea culminated in his 1857 statement that “All nature is my bride.”²⁵⁶ Early in the next year he wrote that it had been “long since a human friend has met me with such a glow” as he found in the Andromeda,”²⁵⁷ and that “a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one . . . when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him.”²⁵⁸