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“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
The creation narrative closes its sequence by evaluating the whole created order positively, making goodness a lens for regarding the natural world.
Source note: Genesis 1:31, King James Version; the verse concludes the creation sequence with an assessment of everything that had been made.
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“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”
The natural world is presented as visible testimony to creative order, inviting attention to the sky as a source of awe and reflection.
Source note: Psalm 19:1, King James Version; the psalm opens by treating the heavens and firmament as a form of testimony through creation.
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“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
Emerson connects wisdom with renewed attention, suggesting that curiosity does not always require exotic objects because ordinary experience becomes remarkable when examined closely.
Source note: Nature, Chapter VIII, in Emerson’s discussion of study, inquiry, and finding wonder in ordinary facts.
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“Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice.”
Fields and trees are personified as rejoicing, turning the landscape into part of a larger image of praise, abundance, and shared gladness.
Source note: Psalm 96:12, King James Version; the verse belongs to a sequence in which sea, fields, and trees participate figuratively in rejoicing.
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“The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them.”
Wonder depends partly on receptiveness; the world may contain more than a person notices when attention, knowledge, or imagination remains closed.
Source note: The World I Live In; Keller links perception with the capacity and willingness to receive experience.
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“There is everywhere the vigorous and masculine winter air, and the impalpable sustenance the mind draws from all natural forms.”
Burroughs describes winter landscape as mentally sustaining, suggesting that austere natural forms can nourish attention even when seasonal abundance is absent.
Source note: Winter Sunshine, “The Exhilarations of the Road.” “Masculine” is Burroughs’s nineteenth-century descriptive adjective in this sentence; this collection preserves rather than modernizes the historical wording.