Her countless hands were sowing seeds within his tropic brain. All sights and sounds--all colors, forms and fragments--were stored within the treasury of his mind. His thoughts were moulded by the graceful curves of streams, by winding paths in woods, the charm of quiet country roads, and lanes grown indistinct with weeds and grass--by vines that cling and hide with leaf and flower the crumbling wall's decay--by cattle standing in the summer pools like statues of content. There was within his words the subtle spirit of the season's change--of everything that is, of everything that lies between the slumbering seeds that, half awakened by the April rain, have dreams of heaven's blue, and feel the amorous kisses of the sun, and that strange tomb wherein the alchemist doth give to death's cold dust the throb and thrill of life again. He saw with loving eyes the willows of the meadow-streams grow red beneath the glance of Spring--the grass along the marsh's edge--the stir of life beneath the withered leaves--the moss below the drip of snow--the flowers that give their bosoms to the first south wind that wooes--the sad and timid violets that only bear the gaze of love from eyes half closed--the ferns, where fancy gives a thousand forms with but a single plan--the green and sunny slopes enriched with daisy's silver and the cowslip's gold. As in the leafless woods some tree, aflame with life, stands like a rapt poet in the heedless crowd, so stood this man among his fellow-men. All there is of leaf and bud, of flower and fruit, of painted insect life, and all the winged and happy children of the air that Summer holds beneath her dome of blue, were known and loved by him. He loved the yellow Autumn fields, the golden stacks, the happy homes of men, the orchard's bending boughs, the sumach's flags of flame, the maples with transfigured leaves, the tender yellow of the beech, the wondrous harmonies of brown and gold--the vines where hang the clustered spheres of wit and mirth. He loved the winter days, the whirl and drift of snow--all forms of frost--the rage and fury of the storm, when in the forest, desolate and stripped, the brave old pine towers green and grand--a prophecy of Spring. He heard the rhythmic sounds of Nature's busy strife, the hum of bees, the songs of birds, the eagle's cry, the murmur of the streams, the sighs and lamentations of the winds, and all the voices of the sea. He loved the shores, the vales, the crags and cliffs, the city's busy streets, the introspective, silent plain, the solemn splendors of the night, the silver sea of dawn, and evening's clouds of molten gold. The love of nature freed this loving man.