that
we refrained from decapitating the whole field of daisies at one
fell sweep, when we were once allowed to touch their upturned
faces. A contract was then made on the spot: we were permitted to
pluck the daisies on condition that we plucked but one every day.
The field was not large, and long before the blasts of autumn had
hushed the voices of the flowers, not a single daisy remained.
Advancing spring threw lavish handfuls once more on the grass,
and on these we sported anew with all the ardor of boyhood.

Our enthusiasm for the daisy then is only equaled by the
gratitude it now awakens. Too soon does the busy world, with
unwarrantable liberty, allure us from boyish scenes. Too soon are
the buoyant fancies of youth succeeded by the feverish anxieties
of age, happy innocence by the consciousness of evil, confidence
by doubt, faith by despair. We must chill our demonstrativeness,
restrain our affections, blunt our sensibilities. We must
cultivate conscience until we have too much of it, and become
monkish, savage and misanthropic. The asceticism of manhood is
apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his
guard against his neighbor. In a crowded car, men instinctively
clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking
old gentleman opposite. When we see men so distrustful, we shun
them. They then call us selfish when we feel only solitary. We
protest against such manhood as would lower golden ideals of
youth to its own contemptible _Avernus_. And now as our daisy,
which is blooming before us, sagely nods its white crest as it is
swayed by the passing breeze, it seems to bring back of itself
decades gone forever. We never intend to become a man. We keep
our boy's heart ever fresh and ever warm. We don't care if the
whole human race, from the Ascidians to Darwin himself, assail us
and fiercely thrust us once more into short jackets and
knickerbockers, provided they allow an indefinite vacation in a
daisy field. The joy of childhood is said to be vague. It was all
satisfying to us once, and we do not intend to allow it to waste
in unconscious effervescence among the gaudier though less
gratifying delights of manhood.

It is, however, of daisies among the poets we would speak at more
length. In fact, to the imaginative mind, the daisy in poetry is
as suggestive as the daisy in nature. Philosophically, they are
identical; in the absence of the one you can commune with the
other. Thus