Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/304

290 Jan. 30, 1852. I feel as if I were gradually parting company with certain friends, just as I perceive familiar objects successively disappear when I am leaving my native town in the cars.

After all, where is the flower lore? for the first book, not the last, should contain the poetry of flowers. The natural system may tell us the value of a plant in medicine or the arts, or for food, but neither it nor the Linnæan, to any great extent, tells us its chief value and significance to man, what in any measure accounts for its beauty, its flower-like properties. There will be pages about some fair flower's qualities as food or medicine, but perhaps not a sentence about its significance to the eye (as if the cowslip were better for greens than for yellows), about what children and all flower-lovers gather flowers for. [The book I refer to should be] not addressed to the cook, or the physician, or the dyer merely, but to the lovers of flowers young and old, the most poetical of books in which is breathed man's love of flowers.

Do nothing merely out of good resolutions. Discipline yourself only to yield to love. Suffer yourself to be attracted. It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. There must be the generating force of love behind every