force to bear it. Perhaps it will be well when cold winter comes and locks the instrument up. I am living like an angel, and I don’t know how to get down. Yet they are waiting all around, leaning on the packs they expect me to lift; they look at me reverently, affectionately; they are patient, yet I see they are waiting.”[1]
Then comes the following, in which she extracts quite as much from the wild asters as from yuccas and magnolias: —
“I have just returned from a walk this golden autumn morning, with its cloudless sky and champagne air. I found some new wood walks, glades among black pines and hemlocks, openings to the distant hills, graceful in silvery veils. A very peculiar feeling these asters give me, gleaming on every side. They seem my true sisters. They look so refined, so saintly, so melancholy, so generous of their beauty, and the flowers look at me more like eyes than any other. These are good reasons for loving ye, sweet asters, but they do not go to the root of the matter. I feel a really yearning tenderness, a sense of relationship. But the golden-rod is one of the fairy, magical flowers; it grows not up to seek human love amid the light of day, but to mark to the discerning what wealth lies hid in the secret caves of earth. … The disgust at unworthy care, the aching sense of how far deeds are transcended by our lowest aspiration, pass away, and for a while I lean on the bosom of nature, and inhale new life with her breath. Could but love, like knowledge, be its own reward; could we look upon the objects of our affection and rejoice in their existence, purely for its own sake, as we do with the ferns
- ↑ MS. (W. H. C.)
