The busy people at home could tell me very little about the wild flowers,and when I found a new one I thought I was its discoverer.I can see myself now leaning in ecstasy over a small,rough-leaved purple aster in a lonely spot on the hill,and thinking that nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such a flower before,because I never had.I did not know then,that the flower-generations are older than the human race.
The commonest blossoms were,after all,the dearest,because they were so familiar.Very few of us lived upon carpeted floors,but soft green grass stretched away from our door-steps,all golden with dandelions in spring.Those dandelion fields were like another heaven dropped down upon the earth,where our feet wandered at will among the stars.What need had we of luxurious upholstery,when we could step out into such splendor,from the humblest door?
The dandelions could tell us secrets,too.We blew the fuzz off their gray beads,and made them answer our question,"Does my mother want me to come home?"Or we sat down together in the velvety grass,and wove chains for our necks and wrists of the dandelion-sterns,and "made believe"we were brides,or queens,or empresses.
Then there was the white rock-saxifrage,that filled the crevices of the ledges with soft,tufty bloom like lingering snow-drifts,our May-flower,that brought us the first message of spring.
There was an elusive sweetness in its almost imperceptible breath,which one could only get by smelling it in close bunches.
Its companion was the tiny four-cleft innocence-flower,that drifted pale sky-tints across the chilly fields.Both came to us in crowds,and looked out with us,as they do with the small girls and boys of to-day,from the windy crest of Powder House Hill,--the one playground of my childhood which is left to the children and the cows just as it was then.We loved these little democratic blossoms,that gathered around us in mobs at our May Day rejoicings.It is doubtful whether we should have loved the trailing arbutus any better,had it strayed,as it never did,into our woods.
Violets and anemones played at hide-and-seek with us in shady places.The gay columbine rooted herself among the bleak rocks,and laughed and nodded in the face of the east wind,coquettishly wasting the show of her finery on the frowning air.Bluebirds twittered over the dandelions in spring.In midsummer,goldfinches warbled among the thistle-tops;and,high above the bird-congregations,the song-sparrow sent forth her clear,warm,penetrating trill,--sunshine translated into music.
We were not surfeited,in those days,with what is called pleasure;but we grew up happy and healthy,learning unconsciously the useful lesson of doing without.The birds and blossoms hardly won a gladder or more wholesome life from the air of our homely New England than we did.
"Out of the strong came forth sweetness."The Beatitudes are the natural flowering-forth of the Ten Commandments.And the happiness of our lives was rooted in the stern,vigorous virtues of the people we lived among,drawing thence its bloom and song,and fragrance.There was granite in their character and beliefs,but it was granite that could smile in the sunshine and clothe itself with flowers.We little ones felt the firm rock beneath us,and were lifted up on it,to emulate their goodness,and to share their aspirations.
