hopes. And she brings to me no more and no less than green leaves, blue skies, and gay flowers. No delight creeps through me as I see the first early blossom parting the brown earth; no thrill stirs me as the trees, one by one, each after other, don their varied livery. I think I shall soon be like that man of whom it was written that
I would give a year of my life—and that is little enough as I value years just now—to know another such moment as I knew long ago, when Jack and I, searching in earliest spring for wild flowers, came upon the first delicate primrose of the year, nestling in its green leaves. How we stood before it, breathless, entranced, and forbore to put out a hand to pluck it, with some strange, unknown reverence stirring at our hearts that we could not understand, and were only dimly conscious of . . . . I think it must have been our fresh, untried souls that made things, common to us now, so rare and lovely to us then.
Often I shut my eyes, that I may not see the flowers growing so bravely on their stalks. They were here last summer, they will be here next; they are but poor perishable little things, and yet they come back to us every year, unlike those human blossoms that we lay away from our sight with such bitter, passionate tears and cries.
We know that the flowers, pretty, soulless, lovely toys, have no future life; and we do know that our dead will rise again, immortal and incorruptible, to bloom for ever fair and stately in the garden of the Great King. But oh! is not that far away, uprising shadowy, and vague, to the fleshly, eager eyes that would see and know? Here are the flowers, we cry, but where are they? And we fold our empty arms closely above our ravening hearts, that
