Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly nor song of bird. In the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he can not escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; the star remains a star.
I suppose that in 1874, when the book was published, it hadn't occurred to many that the deformity of human laws could achieve ultimate victory over the not-so-eternal beauty of nature. I can't help but think about mountain top removal mining, the BP oil gusher, and the climate change crisis.
A mountain ceases to be a mountain. The ocean ceases to be the ocean. Summer is no longer the same summer. We realized the fragility of nature's divine beauty only after we allowed our barbarity to destroy it.