ensations through these daughters of the sun, sisters to
the flowers that bloom beneath the rays of love! Before long I communed
with the flora of the fields, as a man whom I met in after days at
Grandlieu communed with his bees.

Twice a week during the remainder of my stay at Frapesle I continued the
slow labor of this poetic enterprise, for the ultimate accomplishment of
which I needed all varieties of herbaceous plants; into these I made a
deep research, less as a botanist than as a poet, studying their spirit
rather than their form. To find a flower in its native haunts I walked
enormous distances, beside the brooklets, through the valleys, to the
summit of the cliffs, across the moorland, garnering thoughts even from
the heather. During these rambles I initiated myself into pleasures
unthought of by the man of science who lives in meditation, unknown to
the horticulturist busy with specialities, to the artisan fettered to
a city, to the merchant fastened to his desk, but known to a few
foresters, to a few woodsmen, and to some dreamers. Nature can show
effects the significations of which are limitless; they rise to the
grandeur of the highest moral conceptions--be it the heather in bloom,
covered with the diamonds of the dew on which the sunlight dances;
infinitude decked for the single glance that may chance to fall upon
it:--be it a corner of the forest hemmed in with time-worn rocks
crumbling to gravel and clothed with mosses overgrown with juniper,
which grasps our minds as something savage, aggressive, terrifying as
the cry of the kestrel issuing from it:--be it a hot and barren moor
without vegetation, stony, rigid, its horizon like those of the desert,
where once I gathered a sublime and solitary flower, the anemone
pulsatilla, with its violet petals opening for the golden stamens;
affecting image of my pure idol alone in her valley:--be it great sheets
of water, where nature casts those spots of greenery, a species of
transition between the plant and animal, where life makes haste to come
in flowers and insects, floating there like worlds in ether:--be it
a cottage with its garden of cabbages, its vineyards, its hedges
overhanging a bog, surrounded by a few sparse fields of rye; true image
of many humble existences:--be it a forest path like some cathedral
nave, where the trees are columns and their branches arch the roof, at
the far end of which a light breaks through, mingled with shadows or
tinted with