. Old-fashioned flowers and other oper-air essays . they spring up in his foot steps. They live on, audacious. immortal, untamable. They have 87 FIELD FLOWERS peopled our flower^baskcts with ex^ travagant and unnatural daughters; but they, the poor mothers, have remained similar to what they were a hundred thousand years ago. They have not added a fold to their petals, reordered a pistil, altered a shade, invented a perfume. They keep the secret of a stubborn mission. They are the indelible primitives. The soil is theirs since its origin. They repre^ sent, in short, an invariable thought, an o
. Old-fashioned flowers and other oper-air essays . they spring up in his foot steps. They live on, audacious. immortal, untamable. They have 87 FIELD FLOWERS peopled our flower^baskcts with ex^ travagant and unnatural daughters; but they, the poor mothers, have remained similar to what they were a hundred thousand years ago. They have not added a fold to their petals, reordered a pistil, altered a shade, invented a perfume. They keep the secret of a stubborn mission. They are the indelible primitives. The soil is theirs since its origin. They repre^ sent, in short, an invariable thought, an obstinate desire, an essential smile of the Earth. That is why it is well to question88 FIELD FLOWERSthem. They have evidently some^thing to tell us. And, then, let usnot forget that they were the first—with the sunrises and the autumns,with the springs and the sunsets,with the song of the birds, with thehair, the glance and the divine move^ments of woman—to teach our fathersthat there are useless and beautifulthings upon this globe. . 89 M. * SloiKti. LtiL Early Chrysanthemums. p. 91. ChrysanthemumsI Every year, in November, at the sea- son that follows on the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hour of Autumn, reverently I go to visit the chrysanthemums in the places where chance offers them to my sight. For the rest, it matters little where they arc shown to me by the good will of travel or of sojourn. They are, indeed, the most universal, the most91 CHRYSANTHEMUMS diverse of flowers; but their diversityand surprises arc, so to speak, con^certed, like those of fashion, in arbi-trary Edens. At the same moment,even as with silks, laces, jewels andcurls, a voice composed of sky andlight gives the password in time andspace; and, docile as the most beauti-ful of women, simultaneously, in everycountry, in every latitude, the flowersobey the sacred decree. It is enough, then, to enter at ran-dom one of those crystal museums inwhich their somewhat funereal riches
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectflowers, bookyear1906
