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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
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