ldest brother, who
lived away from home, came back for a time, and when I told him my
delight in the purple threads of the hazel buds, he made me notice
a similar sexual difference among flowers.

"Now my mind was satisfied. I learned that what had troubled me was
a widespread arrangement throughout nature to which even the quiet,
beautiful growths of flowers were subject. Henceforth human and
natural life, soul and flower existence, were inseparable in my
eyes, and my hazel blossoms I see still, like angels that opened to
me the great temple of nature.... Henceforth it seemed as if I had
the clue of Ariadne, which would lead me through all the wrong and
devious ways of life; and a life of more than thirty years with
nature, often, it is true, falling back and clouded for great
intervals, has taught me to know this, especially the plant and
tree world, as a mirror--I might say, an emblem--of man's life in
its highest spiritual relations; so that I look upon it as one of
the greatest and deepest conceptions of human life and spirit when
in holy Scripture the comparison of good and evil is drawn from a
tree. Nature, as a whole,--even the realms of crystals and
stones,--teaches us to discriminate good from evil; but, for me,
not so powerfully, quietly, clearly, and openly as the plant and
flower kingdom."

The stronger this feeling of the universality of sex, the more
dispersive, as it were, is the thought of the subject. It would be
difficult to connect personal and impure thoughts or feelings with a
star whose distance in space was realized; and so with all other
thoughts, the more they can be elevated into wide, general regions, the
less disturbing they will be likely to become.

All the facts of sex-life can be learned in the flower, and the
associations thus indelibly impressed cannot fail to leave at least a
trace of fragrance and loveliness on even an obtuse nature. No matter
what the later experiences or mistakes may be, the whole conception of
this side of life cannot sink so low as might be the case if there were
not this flower-sweet background. And that is worth something.

It is not difficult to pass at once from the flower life to human life,
and there are cases where this may be advisable. When, however, the
beginning-work has been done with young children, and when we consider
all the stress laid upo