-tamer,
without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or
hit from the shoulder."

That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette.--Do you ever wonder why
poets talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who
did not talk about them? Don't you think a poem, which, for the
sake of being original, should leave them out, would be like those
verses where the letter A or E or some other is omitted? No,--they
will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer fields, to
the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more
shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or
the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying
over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,
--in the dust where men lie, dust also,--on the mounds that bury
huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-heap,--still that
same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a
flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities,--those splashes and
streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which
you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a
tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot
whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It
is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will
listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments,--not
with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but
by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
the blue hyacinth which I have,--very certainly not for the crushed
lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You
love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't
doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young
memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask
roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I
like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old
homely sounds that are better than music to me. However, I suppose
it's foolish to tell such things.

--It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the
divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead
languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and
therefore do not bear quotation as such.

Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-