“Pick out the best, not the worst. We escaped the very Gehenna at Jericho, following murderers, the storm, slavery; now free, fed, rested, the eastern air washed and sunned to a tonic. I’m drinking lotus balm out of it.” “There it is; the sun’s in thy brain, poet-preacher.” “No, I’m only giving thee back some of thine own sermons. I draw from my own heart no monster memories. If I’ve fought hard battles it sufficeth that I have fought them once. I’ll not recall their bloody sweat and tears for the sake of refighting them. No, I’m going back to the sweet, happy hours of babyhood; for I tell thee, knight, there is a world of joy to a man, scorched by stern experience, to forget himself sometimes back to the lullabys and warblings of the days of his innocence.” “I can’t do it.” “I can’t help doing it, especially in this place! My whole being feeds on a present scent of home.” “Thou knowest the country hereabouts?” “My soul laughs in friendly converse with these crocuses, pinks, and asphodels, turning the velvet, grassy plains to palace carpets. I’m saying to myself these blossoms must know me, their bowing heads and offered odors being my reward for nursing their mothers when I was a boy.” “Well, flowers are sincere friends; they never change and are all charitable. That’s why they are deemed fit presents to those in prison, or proper offering to be laid on the breast of the dead Magdalene.” “Ah, dead Magdalene; for even the symbol of a broken promise; born to be a queen of love, by perverted love dethroned! Woman, man’s ward, by man betrayed; the guide star setting in black night; the savior of human purity befouling all purity! Given the power by which Eve was to crush the serpent’s head and using it to breed all serpentine ills. This is Eve turning a volcano upon Eden. Put flowers upon her once passionate, now dead, heart, in awful contrast! Nature at her worst is intensified anguish; at her best an ocean of joy, an universe of light and song. So I learn of nature under man. Listen to nature’s perfumed throb now: these thousands of feathered songsters, millions of lesser creatures, whose melody is larger than themselves and more perceptible. Hear the humming, thrumming, buzzing, trumpetings. Oh, this is life as the All-Saving tuned it to utter joy! It widens, deepens, thickens; getting sweeter, louder, happier all the way. A tempest, set to music, knight. I’m caught in its whirl and join in its praisings. It comes over me as an insight of what nature really is. God cares for it all and made it thus, to throb and exult!” Ichabod paused in transport. “But I sometimes think there’s a great waste of these things; there is so much in places where there is no human ear or eye to hear or see.”