Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/134

 requires. These toys of childhood, these spiritual tokens, fragile but unbreakable, live, indeed, in the flowers we used to gather for our local Saint; in the woods where we were often lost or caught by the storm; in the tall grass through which we would wade, playing hide and seek; in the trees we used to climb, whose branches still murmur our songs of joy; in the roaring rivulets whose wintry wrath we defied; in the Summer vineyards whose gold and purple grapes we stole; in the April fields whose lotus and iris and daffodil we gathered for Palm Sunday. The love for the mother-country that does not consist essentially of these, is not spiritually pure enough to engage our thought.

And yet, to be honest with the reader to the end, I must add, having already spoken of a second birth, that in its nursery Concord has sown a pinch of the flower-seeds of transcendentalism. But what chance have these seeds to grow in the cold and sunless habitations of the city? In my ceaseless