young cousins) after which I
searched a whole summer with unabated eagerness. I was fairly haunted
by its ideal image. Henry von Ofterdingen never sought with intenser
desire for his wondrous blue flower, nor more vainly; for I never
found it. One day, this same cousin and myself, while wandering in
the woods, found ourselves on the summit of a little rocky precipice,
and at its foot, lo! in full bloom, a splendid variety of the orchis,
(a flower I had never seen before,) looking to my astonished eyes like
an enchanted princess in a fairy tale. With a scream of joy we both
sprang for the prize. Harriet seized it first, but after gazing at it
a moment with a quiet smile, presented it to me. "Kings may be blest,
but I was glorious!" I never felt so rich before or since.

But there was one flower,--and I must confess that I made acquaintance
with it in a garden, but at an age when I thought all things grew out
of the blessed earth of their own sweet will,--which, as it is the
first I remember to have loved, has maintained the right of priority
in my affections to this day. Nay, many an object of deep, absorbing
interest, more than one glowing friendship, has meantime passed away,
leaving no memorial but sad and bitter thoughts; while this wee flower
still lives and makes glad a little green nook in my heart. It was a
Button-Rose of the smallest species, the outspread blossom scarce
exceeding in size a shilling-piece. It stood in my grandfather's
garden,--that garden which, at my first sight of it, (I was then about
five years old,) seemed to me boundless in extent, and beautiful
beyond aught that I had seen or thought before. It was a large,
old-fashioned kitchen-garden, adorned and enriched, however, as then
the custom was, with flowers and fruit-trees. Several fine old
pear-trees and a few of the choicest varieties of plum and cherry were
scattered over it; currants and gooseberries lined the fences; the
main alley, running through its whole extent, was thickly bordered by
lilacs, syringas, and roses, with many showy flowers intermixed, and
terminated in a very pleasant grape-arbor. Behind this rose a steep
green hill covered with an apple-orchard, through which a little
thread of a footpath wound up to another arbor which stood on the
summit relieved against the sky. It was but little after sunrise, the
first morning of my visit, when I timidly opened the garden gate and
stood in full view of these glories. All was dew