e is not a matter of
pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The
texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You
must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the
light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live
either for appetites or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit,
in its passionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the
cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and
emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.

The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very
nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of
countless ages to produce the form that we see--the gracious beauties of
the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a
Clovelly rose is beautiful.

The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding
mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in
your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's
button; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in
human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand--and all
about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand,
and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered
itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget
that inner ardency--the virgin unfolding to the sun--born of some great
passion that seemed poised between earth and heaven--and expectant of
its own great passion's maturity.

I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who
would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song
of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things.
I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings--the ecstasy of the little
old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in
the world.

I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose
marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose
corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the
shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a
thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but
the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The
first had great foli