The Sense of Beauty comes from Early Contact with Nature

There is no end to the store of common information, got in such a way that it will never be forgotten, with which an intelligent child may furnish himself before he begins his school career.  The boy who can tell you off-hand where to find each of the half-dozen most graceful birches, the three or four finest ash trees in the neighborhood of his home, has chances in life a dozen to one compared with the lower, slower intelligence that does not know an elm from an oak – not merely chances of success, by chances of a larger, happier life, for it is curious how certain feelings are linked with the mere observation of Nature and natural objects.  “The aesthetic sense of the beautiful,” says Dr. Carpenter, “of the sublime, of the harmonious, seems in its most elementary form to connect itself immediately with the Perceptions which arise out of the contact of our minds with external Nature”[1];  while he quotes Dr. Morell, who says still more forcibly that “All those who have shown a remarkable appreciation of form and beauty date their first impressions from a period lying far behind the existence of definite ideas or verbal instruction.”[2]