hty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One
looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest
deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of
woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's
arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his
actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her
energy that quickens his conceiving....

"Roses--how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and
women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of
themselves? Do you think that the actual _hurt_ of their beauty--the
restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their
silent leaning over the rim of a vase--is nothing more than a product of
soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as
moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist
before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has
come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think
as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like,
that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic
influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening--something that makes a
flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.

"... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have
reached roses--have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they
linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses.
In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which
has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the
white to the pink roses--and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the
search ever more passionate--until we begin to discover that which our
hearts are searching for--not upon any plant but in ideal.

"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about
producing the flower--as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of
the thought. At least we think so--as the universe is evolving to
fulfil at last the full thought of God....

"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes,
until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy
Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste
as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety t