"[St. Francis] had far too much love of each single thing to have any vulgar love of Nature."

Francis was extraordinary in this truer and higher sense, that he was one of those men who arise with an absolutely original vision of things inside their heads, who create the only indestructible thing—an atmosphere. With each of such men there is truly made a new heaven and a new earth, for they do not see the heaven and the earth that others see. If Buddha, Plato and St. Francis had looked at the same tree they would have been standing in three different worlds. Buddha would have seen in the tree a gross embodiment in which a celestial force was immured, a spirit in a disgraceful incognito. Plato would have seen it as the shadow of a perfect tree existing in the ideal world. Francis would have seen it simply as “Brother Tree,” an individual neighbour in the parish of the Cosmos, a silent but amusing companion, a man, as it were, with green hair and one leg. The whole conception was founded, of course, on the Christian doctrine of the great Father whose memory was an unending chronicle, in which the name of every stone or weed was clearly written. But he gave to the doctrine an individual turn of extraordinary beauty and humour by this notion of finding gossips and kinsfolk everywhere in the grotesque camaraderie of the woods and hills. His “Brother Wolf ” and “Sister Lark” have in reality as much in common with the “Brer Wolf ” and “Sis Cow ” of Uncle Remus as with any mere pantheistic philosophy. He had far too much love of each single thing to have any vulgar love of Nature.

-December 1, 1900, The Speaker