en of flowers of thought. Once master the primary solution of the
great problem, once learn the method of its application, and every
flower and simple attribute of life becomes invested with deep
significance and earnest, passionate beauty. But this can be no half-way
study, to be modified or qualified by prejudices. Do you seek, thirst
for Truth, O reader? Dare you grasp it without blanching, without
blushing? Then cast away _all_ the loathsome littleness which has rusted
and fouled around you, and look at Nature as she literally _is_, in her
naked beauty, conceiving and forming, quickening and warming into
infinitely varied and lovely life, and then _forming_ once again with
the strong and harsh influences of death, pain and decay. It avails
nothing to be squeamish and timid in the tremendous laboratory of Truth.
There is but little account taken of your parlor-propriety in the depths
of ocean, where wild sea-monsters engender, where the million-tonned
coral-rock rises to be crowned with palms, amid swaying tides and
currents which cast up in a night leagues of sandy peninsulas. Little
heed is taken of your prudish scruples or foul follies, where the
screaming eagle chases his mate on the road of the mad North-wind;
little care for _your_ pitiful perversions of health and truth into
scurvy jests or still scurvier blushes, wherever life takes new form as
life, ever begetting through the endless chain of being. There is no
learning a little and leaving the rest, for him who would explore the
fountain-springs of Poetry and of Nature. The true poet, like the true
man of science, cannot limit vision and thought to a handful of twigs or
a cluster of leaves. In the minutest detail he recalls the roots, trunk,
and branches--the smallest part is to him a reflection of the whole, and
formed by the same laws.

The great minds of the early mythologic and hitherto Unknown Age had
this advantage in shaping that stupendous _Lehre_ or lore which embraced
under the same laws, mythology, language, science, poetry, and art--they
modified nothing and avoided nothing for fear of shocking conventional
and artificial feelings. Nature was to them what she was to
herself--_literal_. The great law of reproduction, around whose primary
stage gathers all that is attractive or beautiful in organic life; the
'moment' _toward_ which everything blossoms, and _from_ which everything
fades, was not by them ignored as non-existent, or treated in paltry