This is from a skinny old leather book I founf in a thrift store one time called "The Beauty of the Night" by a man named Archibald Rutledge. I don't know too much about him. He wrote a few christian books I think, a few of which I've found and read, but none of them are as good as this one. This passage is another one of those I wish I'd written:
From boyhood I have had a passionate yearning to see and feel the loveliness of nature; and much of my wandering has been purposefully into wastelands and wildernesses. I have been after life's Answer. In fragmentary yet thrilling fashion I think I have heard it. Any heart that listens for it amid the stillness and beauty of God's world will hear it. Blind, helpless, hungry, clambering are our hearts. They want to hear some heart-beat which will not only account for the beating of their own will give them a sense of sustaining love and care. And what is the answer? It is to hear the voice of the Eternal speaking in Beauty. I think I hear the answer when I smell dewy locust blooms softly falling in the night wind; when I hear the whipporwill's ghostly sweet voice; and I listen to the tiny trill of the field sparrow.
Voices of the night! They have a music that we do not hear by day, a meaning and a message for the heart. For us the stars should have a language, and the silence of the night should be eloquent. Immanuel Kant declared that the two great wonders of the universe are the starry heavens without and the moral law within. It is at night that both of these wonders are most apparent to us. To some almighty wand wild flowers and worlds make response, and human hearts are likewise so sceptered. Tenderness and dewiness and solemn radiance mark the cloistered reign Night, and her voices speak to our spirits infallibly, whether it is the singing bird, or in the beauty of the constellations, or in the growing of the corn, or in the pines their vespers chanting.
