Yet she knows me, too. She likes to linger, while one talks to her. She knows quite well she makes me mad when she swings her tail in my face. So sometimes she swings it, just on purpose: and looks at me out of the black corner of her great, pure-black eye, when I yell at her. And when I find her, away down the timber, when she is a ghost, and lost to the world, like a spider dangling in the void of chaos, then she is relieved. She comes to, out of a sort of trance, and is relieved, trotting up home with a queer, jerky cowy gladness. But she is never _really_ glad, as the horses are. There is always a certain untouched chaos in her. Where she is when she’s _in_ the trance, heaven only knows. That’s Susan! I have a certain relation to her. But that she and I are in equilibrium, or in harmony, I would never guarantee while the world stands. As for her individuality being in balance with mine, one can only feel the great blank of the gulf. Yet a relationship there is. She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. There _is_ a sort of relation between us. And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan’s, suspended in the relationship. Cow Susan by the forest’s rim A black-eyed Susan was to him And nothing more-- One understands Wordsworth and the primrose and the yokel. The yokel had no relation at all--or next to none--with the primrose. Wordsworth gathered it into his own bosom and made it part of his own nature. “I, William, am also a yellow primrose blossoming on a bank.” This, we must assert, is an impertinence on William’s part. He ousts the primrose from its own individuality. He doesn’t allow it to call its soul its own. It must be identical with _his_ soul. Because, of course, by begging the question, there is but One Soul in the universe. This is bunk. A primrose has its own peculiar primrosy identity, and all the oversouling in the world won’t melt it into a Williamish oneness. Neither will the yokel’s remarking: “Nay, boy, that’s nothing. It’s only a primrose!”--turn the primrose into nothing. The primrose will neither be assimilated nor annihilated, and Boundless Love breaks on the rock of one more flower. It has its own individuality, which it opens with lovely naïveté to sky and wind and William and yokel, bee and beetle alike. It _is_ itself. But its very floweriness is a kind of communion with all things: the love unison. In this lies the eternal absurdity of Wordsworth’s lines. His own behaviour, primrosely, was as foolish as the yokel’s. “A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him And nothing more--” A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him And a great deal more-- A primrose by the river’s brim Lit up its pallid yellow glim Upon the floor--