Dew on the strawberry leaf evokes the Elizabethan lace ruff, hung with pearls, an artifice undoubtedly inspired by an intimate view of nature such as this. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by humans; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of our will with those same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.