I'm currently reading C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words. 

Two things particularly stand out to me as I am reading this book: first, the breadth and depth of Lewis's reading; and second, his incredible memory of what he has read. Let me give an example. In the second chapter of the book, he is discussing the different meanings of the word "nature" down through the centuries. One of these meanings is Nature personified, or "Great Mother Nature." Lewis discusses this usage in the following paragraph:

[The use of the word "nature" to refer to] Great Mother Nature has proved a most potent sense down to the present day. It is 'she' who does nothing by leaps, abhors a vacuum, is die gute Mutter, is red in tooth and claw, 'never did betray the heart that loved her', eliminates the unfit, surges to ever higher and higher forms of life, decrees, purposes, warns, punishes and consoles. Even now I am not sure that this meaning is always used purely as a figure, to say what would equally make sense without it. The test is to remove the figure and see how much sense remains. Of all the pantheon Great Mother Nature has, at any rate, been the hardest to kill. 

Lewis is referring to several famous passages on Nature from English letters--Tennyson, Wordsworth, Darwin, etc. Yet nearby this paragraph, he refers to Langland, Bernardus Silvester, Chaucer, Aristotle, Plato, Euripides, Addison, Milton, Spenser, and others. What strikes me is that Lewis is writing in a day without Google Scholar and without library databases. He is probably sitting in the Bodleian as he writes this, but much of this is off the top of his head. 

The gulf between the modern "well-read" reader (such as an English prof) and a reader like Lewis is immense. I read Lewis in awe, but love to learn from him.

      . . . If in these times of fear,
      This melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown,
      If, 'mid indifference and apathy,
      And wicked exultation when good men
      On every side fall off, we know not how,
      To selfishness, disguised in gentle names
      Of peace and quiet and domestic love
      Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
      On visionary minds; if, in this time
      Of dereliction and dismay, I yet
      Despair not of our nature, but retain
      A more than Roman confidence, a faith
      That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
      The blessing of my life--the gift is yours,
      Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,
      Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed
      My lofty speculations; and in thee,
      For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
      A never-failing principle of joy
      And purest passion.

         --William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 2

Unlike Wordsworth, I don't see nature as the source of such stability, but I certainly believe that time spent in nature has a healing influence during hard times, and I certainly empathize with him in these lines, especially after the recent election.

I have a new essay on Humane Pursuits this week: "3 Ways to Stay Sane in a Dark Time." The essay discusses the poetry of R. S. Thomas.

From a journal entry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1871:

What you look at hard seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature. One day early in March when long streamers [clouds] were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping--regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone--had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape of things is.

Poems and Prose, 210-11

A journal entry from Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Sept. 24: First saw the Northern Lights. My eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline. Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it. This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.

Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 204-5