Yet, after all, it is questionable whether men have really bettered
God's CHEF D'OEUVRE in the berry line. They have enlarged it and
made it more plentiful and more certain in its harvest. But
sweeter, more fragrant, more poignant in its flavour? No. The wild
berry still stands first in its subtle gusto.
Size is not the measure of excellence. Perfection lies in quality,
not in quantity. Concentration enhances pleasure, gives it a point
so that it goes deeper.
Is not a ten-inch trout better than a ten-foot sturgeon? I would
rather read a tiny essay by Charles Lamb than a five-hundred page
libel on life by a modern British novelist who shall be nameless.
Flavour is the priceless quality. Style is the thing that counts
and is remembered, in literature, in art, and in berries.
No JOCUNDA, nor TRIUMPH, nor VICTORIA, nor any other high-titled
fruit that ever took the first prize at an agricultural fair, is
half so delicate and satisfying as the wild strawberry that dropped
into my mouth, under the hemlock tree, beside the Swiftwater.
A touch of surprise is essential to perfect sweetness.
To get what you have been wishing for is pleasant; but to get what
you have not been sure of, makes the pleasure tingle. A new door of
happiness is opened when you go out to hunt for something and
discover it with your own eyes. But there is an experience even
better than that. When you have stupidly forgotten (or despondently
forgone) to look about you for the unclaimed treasures and unearned
blessings which are scattered along the by-ways of life, then,
sometimes by a special mercy, a small sample of them is quietly laid
before you so that you cannot help seeing it, and it brings you back
to a sense of the joyful possibilities of living.
How full of enjoyment is the search after wild things,--wild birds,
wild flowers, wild honey, wild berries! There was a country club on
Storm King Mountain, above the Hudson River, where they used to
celebrate a festival of flowers every spring. Men and women who had
conservatories of their own, full of rare plants and costly orchids,
came together to admire the gathered blossoms of the woodlands and
meadows. But the people who had the best of the entertainment were
the boys and girls who wandered through the thickets and down the
brooks, pushed their way into the tangled copses and crept
venturesomely across the swamps, to look for the flowers. Some of
the seekers may have had a few gray hairs; but for that day at least
they were all boys and girls. Nature was as young as ever, and they
were all her children. Hand touched hand without a glove. The
hidden blossoms of friendship unfolded. Laughter and merry shouts
and snatches of half-forgotten song rose to the lips. Gay adventure
sparkled in the air. School was out and nobody listened for the
bell. It was just a day to live, and be natural, and take no
thought for the morrow.
There is great luck in this affair of looking for flowers. I do not
see how any one who is prejudiced against games of chance can
consistently undertake it.
For my own part, I approve of garden flowers because they are so
orderly and so certain; but wild flowers I love, just because there
is so much chance about them. Nature is all in favour of certainty
in great laws and of uncertainty in small events. You cannot
appoint the day and the place for her flower-shows. If you happen
to drop in at the right moment she will give you a free admission.
But even then it seems as if the table of beauty had been spread for
the joy of a higher visitor, and in obedience to secret orders which
you have not heard.
Have you ever found the fringed gentian?
"Just before the snows,
There came a purple creature
That lavished all the hill:
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition:
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked her,--
'Creator, shall I bloom?'"
There are strange freaks of fortune in the finding of wild flowers,
and curious coincidences which make us feel as if some one were
playing friendly tricks on us. I remember reading, one evening in
May, a passage in a good book called THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS,
in which Colonel Higginson describes the singular luck that a friend
of his enjoyed, year after year, in finding the rare blossoms of the
double rueanemone. It seems that this man needed only to take a
walk in the suburbs of any town, and he would come upon a bed of
these flowers, without effort or design. I envied him his good
fortune, for I had never discovered even one of them. But the next
morning, as I strolled out to fish the Swiftwater, down below Billy
Lerns's spring-house I found a green bank in the shadow of the wood
all bespangled with tiny, trembling, twofold stars,--double
rueanemones, for luck! It was a favourable omen, and that day I
came home with a creel full of trout.
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