Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Blair

Nature, Blair suggests, isn’t a cathedral of static beauty; it’s a restless workshop. Calling action the “genius of nature” flips the usual praise we give the natural world. We often admire its forms - mountains, flowers, the pleasing symmetry of a shell. Blair points instead to the engine underneath: growth, decay, predation, weather, reproduction. Nature’s signature isn’t elegance, it’s motion.

The small hedge “so to speak” matters. It’s a wink of caution, acknowledging he’s personifying nature while insisting the metaphor is still useful. “Genius” in Blair’s era carried the sense of a guiding spirit or governing principle, not just IQ. So the line doesn’t merely compliment nature’s cleverness; it assigns nature an animating intelligence that expresses itself through doing. The subtext is quietly moral: if the natural order is defined by exertion and change, then human stagnation starts to look like a kind of rebellion against the world as it actually is.

Context sharpens the edge. Blair is writing in an age where Protestant moral seriousness, early Enlightenment curiosity, and the coming taste for “natural” philosophy overlap. His poetry (most famously The Grave) is preoccupied with mortality and time; action becomes the counterweight to death’s stillness. The line offers a terse cosmology: life is not a possession but a process, and the closest thing nature has to a mind is its refusal to stop.