t, and its stony, juiceless berries, a sort of
handsome vixen among vines,--the smilax, which can climb though it
cannot stand erect, has little occasion to lord it over the strawberry.
If one has done nothing, or worse than nothing, it is hardly worth while
to boast of the original fashion in which he has gone about it.
Moreover, the very plants of which we are speaking bear witness to the
fact that it is possible to accept help, and still retain to the full
one's own individuality. The strawberry is no more a plagiarist than the
smilax, nor the grape than the nettle. If the vine clings to the cedar,
the connection is but mechanical. Its spirit and life are as independent
of the savin as of the planet Jupiter. Even the dodder, which not only
twines about other weeds, but actually sucks its life from them, does
not thereby lose an iota of its native character. If a man is only
original to begin with,--so the parable seems to run,--he is under a
kind of necessity to remain so (as Shakespeare did), no matter how much
help he may draw from alien sources.

This truth of the vegetable world is the more noteworthy, because, along
with it there goes a very strong and persistent habit of individual
variation. The plant is faithful to the spirit of its inherited law, but
is not in bondage to the letter. Our "high-bush blackberries," to take a
familiar illustration, are all of one species, but it does not follow
that they are all exactly alike. So far from it, I knew in my time--and
the school-boys of the present day are not less accurately informed, we
may presume--where to find berries of all shapes, sizes, and flavors.
Some were sour, and some were bitter, and some (I can taste them yet)
were finger-shaped and sweet. And what is true of _Rubus villosus_ is
probably true of all plants, though in varying degrees. I do not recall
a single article of our annual wild crop--blueberries, huckleberries,
blackberries, cherries, grapes, pig-nuts (a bad name for a good thing),
shagbarks, acorns, and so forth--in which there was not this constant
inequality among plants of the same species, perfectly well defined, and
never lost sight of by us juvenile connoisseurs. If we failed to find
the same true of other vines and bushes, which for our purposes bore
blossoms only, the explanation is not far to seek. Our perceptions,
aesthetic and gastronomic, were unequally developed. We were in the case
of the man to whom a poet is a poet, though he