_June 8th._
There are many charms connected with the ideal life of the tropics.
The chief drawback is, that _manhood_ deliquesces and runs out under
the equator. This is not paid for by luscious bananas, oranges,
orchids, or ever-blooming vines and trees. Enjoyment palls when it
flows unceasingly and without break. To live in summer forever,
without one ungarlanded hour in the year, might, for aught we know,
sate us with sweetness.
The tropics were not made to live in all the year. They are a refuge
for one or two months. After frost and snow have had their full meal,
and the northern winds have by familiarity bred contempt and
influenzas, it is a good thing to go to sleep on the good steamer Moro
Castle, and wake up in Cuba, or Jamaica, or to go on through the Gulf
of Mexico to the Magdalena valley in Northern South America, which the
painter Church once told me he regarded as the most perfect climate
that he had ever found in all travels.
But as soon as the contrast is satisfied, we are sure that one in the
tropics must long for the northern zones, northern fruits and northern
flowers; for calm days without pestilent insects; for _grass_, and for
DANDELIONS!
Now I have got upon my real subject. The foregoing sentences were in
the nature of a rhetorical introduction,—a sly and adroit way of
getting people to listen to the praises of one of the brightest charms
of our northern spring days.
I am moved to celebrate this brilliant, and yet, I fear, not
much-prized flower, from the glory of my morning view. Out of my back
windows I look down on four or five grassy yards, all well kept and
lying well open to the sun. Soon after the grass springs you may see
such a gorgeous array of dandelions as might make a florist fairly
envious! They jut out from the edges of the walks, they crowd the
narrow strips of grass at the lower end, they fairly jostle each other
like a crowd pouring out of a public hall, in their strife to get into
the light and open their golden crowns to the sun.
So brilliant are they and so hardy, that we are apt to miss the
sentiment that lives in them. They are not of the flowers that
impudently push themselves forward, demanding us to look at them
whether we will or no. With all their amazing brilliancy, they are
still coy love-flowers, that wait for the sun, as a bride for the
bridegroom. For dandelions do not wake up in the morning before we do.
They wait till the sun has long called them, and then they fling open
their golden disks, and shine with a real delight of existence, with a
cheer and abundance which ought to strike joy into the heart of a
misanthrope.
Soon after noon is at its highest, the dandelion, thinking that the
world is bright enough, and that the sun can manage the rest of the
day, folds itself up, laces the golden filaments with the green
lepals, and retires to meditation. Thus it plays courtier in the
morning, and nun in the afternoon.
But what a name! _Dens leonis!_ or _Dent-de-lion!_ Or, if you fly to
the systematic name,—the harsh _Taraxacum!_ Shall such a home-loving,
radiant creature be called _Lion’s Tooth_, because some impertinent,
prying botanist fancied that he had espied the shape of a lion’s tooth
in its minor forms?
Just as soon as we have got politics settled, business reformed, and
human nature elevated, I am determined to form a society for the
reformation of botanical names. Botany has been the Noah’s Ark of
pedants. Every absurd whim of every pragmatical professor has been
turned into Greek or Latin, and hung about the neck of unhappy flower.
One might as well hang a dictionary around a child’s neck by way of
ornament, as to impose on flowers such outrageous and outlandish names
as now defend the science of botany from all approach, as a fort is
defended by a line of _chevaux-de-frise_.
But blessings on those cheery children of the sun! They are born of
brightness; their whole life is like a smile of love. They are not a
flower for the hand; they are not to be worn in the bosom. They do not
love the house, or the pressure of a close bouquet. Their life is in
the free open air. They shine out on you along your daily walk. They
crowd your yard with golden coin, which, good for nothing in the
market, may yet have the power to confer more enjoyment than could
golden dollars or ducats.
This is my annual tribute. To-day I look out of my window, and thank
God for the gifts which he sends me by the hand of Dandelions! Do they
know my thoughts as I gaze on them? Is there not some sympathy between
things in nature which wake up the soul to delight, and aid the soul
thus aroused? Behind signs and signals, back of all articulate
utterance, may there not be a subtler relationship which will yet be
discovered, as connecting the inward and the outward with a living
relationship?