protection, but are
for its admirers an excellent discipline in forbearance. They make it
easier for us, as Emerson says, to "love the wood rose and leave it on
the stalk." In addition to which I am moved to say that the rose, like
the holly, illustrates a truth too seldom insisted upon; namely, that
people are more justly condemned for the absence of all good qualities
than for the presence of one or two bad ones.

Some such plea as this, though with a smaller measure of assurance, I
should make in behalf of plants like the barberry and the bramble. The
latter, in truth, sometimes acts as if it were not so much fighting us
off as drawing us on. Leaning far forward and stretching forth its arms,
it buttonholes the wayfarer, so to speak, and with generous country
insistence forces upon him the delicious clusters which he, in his
preoccupation, seemed in danger of passing untasted. I think I know the
human counterparts of both barberry and bramble,--excellent people in
their place, though not to be chosen for bosom friends without a careful
weighing of consequences. Judging them not by their manners, but by
their fruits, we must set them on the right hand. It would go hard with
some of the most pious of my neighbors, I imagine, if the presence of a
few thorns and prickles were reckoned inconsistent with a moderately
good character.

As for reprobates like the so-called "poison ivy" and "poison dogwood,"
they have perhaps borrowed a familiar human maxim,--"All is fair in
war." In any case, they are no worse than savage heathen, who kill their
enemies with poisoned arrows, or than civilized Christians, who stab the
reputation of their friends with poisoned words. Their marked comeliness
of habit may be taken as a point in their favor; or, on the contrary, it
may be held to make their case only so much the blacker, by laying them
liable to the additional charge of hypocrisy. The question is a nice
one, and I gladly leave it for subtler casuists than I to settle.

How refreshing to turn from all these, from the thistle and the bramble,
yea, even from the rose itself, to gentle spirits like the violet and
anemone, the arbutus and hepatica! These wage no war. They are of the
original Society of Friends. Who will may spoil them without hurt. Their
defense is with their Maker. I wonder whether anybody ever thinks of
such flowers as representative of any order of grown people, or whether
to everybody else they are forever child