Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a
light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields--at first
earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cluster-plants, eight,
ten, twenty leaves to a plant--plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre
lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the
fences--then close to the ground, but soon springing up--leaves as broad
as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long--so fresh and dewy in the
morning--stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high. The
farmers, I find, think the mullein a mean unworthy weed, but I have
grown to a fondness for it. Every object has its lesson, enclosing
the suggestion of everything else--and lately I sometimes think all is
concentrated for me in these hardy, yellow-flower'd weeds. As I come
down the lane early in the morning, I pause before their soft wool-like
fleece and stem and broad leaves, glittering with countless diamonds.
Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently return'd
together; at such long intervals I stand or sit among them,
musing--and woven with the rest, of so many hours and moods of partial
rehabilitation--of my sane or sick spirit, here as near at peace as it
can be.