You know well enough what
I mean by youth and age;--something in the soul, which has no more to do
with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with
the grass a thousand feet above it.
I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only youth, but
genius, to read this paper. I don't mean to imply that it required any
whatsoever to talk what I have here written down. It did demand a certain
amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is given by a
common school education. So much I do claim. But here I have related, at
length, a string of trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet
to transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the
windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and
meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes
with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.
My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing
flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown,
homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And yet--and yet--it is
something better than flowers; it is a _seed-capsule_. Many a gardener
will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does
not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
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