ual, and you seem
dissolved in it, yet everything about you is beating with warm,
terrestrial, human love and life delightfully substantial and familiar.
The resiny pines are types of health and steadfastness; the robins
feeding on the sod belong to the same species you have known since
childhood; and surely these daisies, larkspurs, and goldenrods are the
very friend-flowers of the old home garden. Bees hum as in a harvest
noon, butterflies waver above the flowers, and like them you lave in the
vital sunshine, too richly and homogeneously joy-filled to be capable of
partial thought. You are all eye, sifted through and through with light
and beauty. Sauntering along the brook that meanders silently through
the meadow from the east, special flowers call you back to
discriminating consciousness. The sod comes curving down to the water's
edge, forming bossy outswelling banks, and in some places overlapping
countersunk boulders and forming bridges. Here you find mats of the
curious dwarf willow scarce an inch high, yet sending up a multitude of
gray silky catkins, illumined here and there with, the purple cups and
bells of bryanthus and vaccinium.

Go where you may, you everywhere find the lawn divinely beautiful, as if
Nature had fingered and adjusted every plant this very day. The floating
grass panicles are scarcely felt in brushing through their midst, so
flue are they, and none of the flowers have tall or rigid stalks. In the
brightest places you find three species of gentians with different
shades of blue, daisies pure as the sky, silky leaved ivesias with warm
yellow flowers, several species of orthocarpus with blunt, bossy spikes,
red and purple and yellow; the alpine goldenrod, pentstemon, and clover,
fragrant and honeyful, with their colors massed and blended. Parting the
grasses and looking more closely you may trace the branching of their
shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of their mist of flowers,
the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the yellow dangling stamens,
and feathery pistils. Beneath the lowest leaves you discover a fairy
realm of mosses,--hypnum, dicranum, polytriclium, and many
others,--their precious spore-cups poised daintily on polished shafts,
curiously hooded, or open, showing the richly ornate peristomas worn
like royal crowns. Creeping liverworts are here also in abundance, and
several rare species of fungi, exceedingly small, and frail, and
delicate, as if made only for beauty.