a poet to
transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the
windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull
and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.

My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come
bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this
poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless.
And yet--and yet--it is something better than flowers; it is a
SEED-CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of
his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very
probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
not for individual experiences which differ from those of others
only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty
thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best
of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which
the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a
red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a
fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the
low-"studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled
over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have
known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.

Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that
white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and
just so of my special relationships with other things and with my
rice. One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere
fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having
thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than
single waves in the ocean;--but the accidents or trivial marks
which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory
our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.

Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause
at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself
seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to
follow. For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals
such as poets of