.

"Many, many long centuries have passed since the day the useless little
fern was lost. Millions of human beings have come upon the earth, have
lived and been happy, have suffered, passed away, and have been
forgotten. The soft, moist clay that clasped the fern hardened into rock
and kept safely in its strong prison the delicate little frond.

"Then one day, not long ago, a thoughtful man studying Nature's secrets
far and wide found up in a valley where a stream had worn a deep
fissure, a queer little rock. When he looked at it, he saw running over
it a strange design, as though some fairy with its magic pencil had
drawn the outline of a fern with every vein distinct, showing in every
line the life of the long-lost plant. It was the fern I told you about.

"Isn't it strange that so delicate a thing as a fern could be kept clear
and fine through all those thousands of years when the earth was
changing and growing, and then finally be thrown up where a man could
find it and read its whole history? The poet, Mary Bolles Branch, saw
the little fern and wrote the beautiful lines which I now want to read
to you."

(Here read the poem, _The Petrified Fern_, found in _Journeys_, Volume
VII, page 77.)

There are very few words or expressions in the poem that will require
any explanation. At the end of the first stanza the phrase "keeping
holiday" means that as there were no human beings on the earth, there
was no real work being done.

At the end of the first line in the second stanza the word _main_ is an
old term that means _ocean_.

The last two lines of the third stanza are meant to show how different
life has been on the planet since man came. Until he appeared there was
no real agony; there was pain, for animals can suffer, but it takes a
mind and soul to know agony. Man cannot live except with suffering and
at a bitter cost.

Until the last two lines of the fourth stanza are reached the poem is
merely a beautiful and musical narrative. The last two lines are the
thought that comes to the poet when she considers the history of the
little fern. It is thinking such thoughts as this that make the poet
different from ordinary men. You and I might see the impression of the
fern and think it beautiful, but its beauty would not suggest to us the
comforting idea that

* * * "God hides some souls away
Sweetly to surprise us, the last day."

Our own poet Longfellow, in _The Builders_, voices a similar though