“It would add very much to the pleasure of life and to its sanctity if we cultivated the habit of seeing what is beautiful and divine in ordinary things, though this is not easy, because our natural tendency is to think and talk most of what is extraordinary. Let there come a vivid flash of lightning, followed instantly by the roll of thunder and the crashing of hail, and we are deeply impressed by it; but how few of us comparatively think of God’s goodness in the deep serene calmness of an autumn day, when the leaves, beautiful even in death, drop one by one under the splendours of the cloudy sky.”

~Alfred Rowland

“The Clouds: God’s Angels of the Sea,”

in The Sunday Magazine (London), 1884