This famous verse by Lord Byron evokes a spiritual bond with nature.
The bond is not only one of spirit and rapture. We humans are a part of nature, being intertwined and dependent upon it. Causing irreversible damage to nature, the mother who houses and nurtures us, is ultimately suicidal.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
— George Gordon Byron
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (around 1815) |