One Reason We Love Nature

Lewis:

What indeed can we imagine heaven to be but unimpeded obedience?

I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water.

The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason.

--C. S. Lewis, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177-78