thing for itself?
Now, there are the flowers. The only way to delight in a flower at your
feet in these days is to watch with it all alone, or keep still about
it. The moment you speak of it, it becomes botany. It's a rare man who
will not tell you all he knows about it. Love isn't worth anything
without a classic name. It's a wonder we have any flowers left. Half the
charm of a flower to me is that it looks demure and talks perfume and
keeps its name so gently to itself. The man who always enjoys views by
picking out the places he knows, is a symbol of all our reading habits
and of our national relation to books. One can glory in a great cliff
down in the depths of his heart, but if you mention it, it is geology,
and an argument. Even the birds sing zoologically, and as for the sky,
it has become a mere blue-and-gold science, and all the wonder seems to
be confined to one's not knowing the names of the planets. I was brought
up wistfully on

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.

But now it is become:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Teacher's told me what you are.

Even babies won't wonder very soon. That is to say, they won't wonder
out loud. Nobody does. Another of my poems was:

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here.

I thought of it the other day when I stepped into the library with the
list of books I had to have an opinion about before Mrs. W----'s
Thursday Afternoon, I felt like a literary infant.

Where did you come from, baby fair?
Out of the here into everywhere.

And the bookcases stared at me.

It is a serious question whether the average American youth is ever
given a chance to thirst for knowledge. He thirsts for ignorance
instead. From the very first he is hemmed in by knowledge. The
kindergarten with its suave relentlessness, its perfunctory
cheerfulness, closes in upon the life of every child with himself. The
dear old-fashioned breathing spell he used to have after getting
here--whither has it gone? The rough, strong, ruthless, unseemly,
grown-up world crowds to the very edge of every beginning life. It has
no patience with trailing clouds of glory. Flocks of infants every
year--new-comers to this planet--who can but watch them sadly, huddled
closer and closer to the little strip of wonder that is left near the
land from which they came? No lingering away from us. No infinite
holiday. Childhood walks a precipice crowded to