Explanation Poem by Della Hodgson James

I'm afraid I could not explain, if I tried ever so much or make any one understand the awful turmoil that went on in my soul, prior to the time I first tried to put my first thoughts into words.
  It was like a war, forever waging in my heart. I could not explain it, even to myself, but I think it began the year I was alone so much, before I went blind, and the years afterwards, also, while I was recovering.
 I was not allowed to sew, read, or cook. But I was allowed to look all I wanted to, provided my eyes were properly shaded. It was then I begin to appreciate the real beauties of nature, and to separate in my mind, the true from the artificial.
  I began to understand that every thing made by man, was only a reproduction of something God had first made. Nothing seemed to be original. Take colors, for instance, where had they first been produced? Well, of course from nature.
  When I look at painted pictures, they seem only a poor imitation of something real. The hills, the fields, and green meadows, the animals, birds, flowers, rivers, clouds, sky, and starry nights, begin to take on a different aspect.
  They were more beautiful to me, than anyone could paint in a hundred years. Seeing them thus I loved them, and they have become my study. I would never see a bright color, but what I would ask myself, where it first originated?
  Then I would compare it to some wild flower I had seen growing in the field or woods. Pretty soon I would have placed it. All the time these things were registering on my subconscious mind. Although I was not aware of them at the time. But they have come to the surface, and crowded into my reveries so much.
  At first I tried to banish them away, finding that impossible, I have done the next best thing I would think of. I have made a life's study of them. The result is the things you will find written in this book.
  My Education is very limited. But no one knows that better than I. That is the reason I am interested in better education, and rural school work. It is not my wish that any one will ever look back upon their life in the hereafter and regret they did not grasp the opportunity, while it was offered, as I failed to do.
  To make an observation study of something, is one thing. But to put it into words, what we learn by that study is quite another. Any one can study nature, but to explain nature, it takes an education.
  Good looked upon his works and saw it was good, If they were good for God, who could make them, or destroy them in one breath, how much more so, are they good for poor insignificient man?
  The landscape, and the elements, both have a very soothing effect upon our lives, and without them, life would be as dreary and dark as a dungeon cell.
  When the Savior was troubled, he took himself to the wilderness, and mountains. They being the same all the time, and unchangeable, gave him strength, and steadied his mind.
  We take our troubles to the very same comforter, oft times, only we do not realize that we do. But here in these pages I will at least try to explain what effect they have had on one person, and how that person appreciates these God given gifts.