As a child I used to fancy that I found in a flower all my whitest and purest thoughts crystallized into a thing; and now, though I am a man, the white-pure thoughts of my childhood still live for me in every flower that blossoms in the meadows; for the flowers bring me back not only my vanished childhood, but my childhood's innocence and peace. Even in those remote child-days I was persuaded that the flowers were not of earth, but of heaven, nor while I had them could I believe heaven to be so very far off, after all. "Else how could the flower-seeds have been blown over its edge, and fallen down to the earth-land?" I would say to myself. And I find myself fancying now, as I fancied then, that God takes the flowers home to His heaven in the winter, and every spring when I welcome them back, I feel that they have come as direct from Him and from heaven as if He had leant down out of the skies to give them to me; and I feel that they are not my flowers, but His flowers; for even as I gather them to call them mine, He puts forth His hand and claims them, so that they fade away again to the heaven whence they came. Yes, I love this world, and the things of it. To me the mere consciousness of life is a gladness, the pulsing of my heart a pleasure. I pencil the latter part of this chapter while lying lazily in a sun-filled meadow, and as I write I seem to feel the very drawing of my breath a joy. The sky spreads above me, a shimmering sea of blue--not the cool, crystalline sapphire of early morning, but the deep dense azure of a midsummer noon. How hot the bees must feel in that furry coat! As I lie here, basking in the sunlight, and watching the buttercups dancing and dipping above the grass, like golden banners amid an army of green-bladed bayonets, I do not wonder that the poor bees keep up a dull droning hum of monotonous murmuring. I can see the hot air simmering and quivering above the clover fields, but all else is drowsily, dreamily still. I know that the streets of the far-off city are reeking and smoking with dry and dusty heat, but here I am in another world, and the bees and the birds are my brothers. This meadow is my boundless prairie; my head is below the level of the grass tops, and they spread feathery, filmy arms above, like the boughs of a vast forest.