"At last this feeling grew more painful, and thrilled my very root. The earth trembled at the touch with a pulse so sympathetic that ever and anon it seemed, could I but retire and hide in that silent bosom for one calm winter, all would be told me, and tranquillity, deep as my desire, be mine. But the law of my being was on me, and man and nature seconded it. Ceaselessly they called on me for my beautiful gifts; they decked themselves with them, nor cared to know the saddened heart of the giver. O, how cruel they seemed at last, as they visited and despoiled me, yet never sought to aid me, or even paused to think that I might need their aid! yet I would not hate them. I saw it was my seeming riches that bereft me of sympathy. I saw they could not know what was hid beneath the perpetual veil of glowing life. I ceased to expect aught from them, and turned my eyes to the distant stars. I thought, could I but hoard from the daily expenditure of my juices till I grew tall enough, I might reach those distant spheres, which looked so silent and consecrated, and there pause a while from these weary joys of endless life, and in the lap of winter find my spring. "But not so was my hope to be fulfilled. One starlight night I was looking, hoping, when a sudden breeze came up. It touched me, I thought, as if it were a cold, white beam from those stranger worlds. The cold gained upon my heart; every blossom trembled, every leaf grew brittle, and the fruit began to seem unconnected with the stem; soon I lost all feeling; and morning found the pride of the garden black, stiff, and powerless. "As the rays of the morning sun touched me, consciousness returned, and I strove to speak, but in vain. Sealed were my fountains, and all my heartbeats still. I felt that I had been that beauteous tree, but now only was--what--I knew not; yet I was, and the voices of men said, It is dead; cast it forth, and plant another in the costly vase. A mystic shudder of pale joy then separated me wholly from my former abode. "A moment more, and I was before the queen and guardian of the flowers. Of this being I cannot speak to thee in any language now possible betwixt us; for this is a being of another order from thee, an order whose presence thou mayst feel, nay, approach step by step, but which cannot be known till thou art of it, nor seen nor spoken of till thou hast passed through it. "Suffice it to say, that it is not such a being as men love to paint; a fairy, like them, only lesser and more exquisite than they; a goddess, larger and of statelier proportion; an angel, like still, only with an added power. Man never creates; he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence: only a deific fancy could evolve from the elements the form that took me home.