We are less simple and true than the dandelion, the dog-fennel and the sweet-clover here in the grass. The small common blossoms grow so cheerily one is glad to come back to them. It is true that not one wee tube or strap or head in any cluster could have much life outside the aggregate blossom, but the integrity and perfection of each is an essential factor in the integrity and perfection of the whole. The tiny single flower that I can pull from this dandelion seems but an insignificant speck, but, by and by, could it have been let alone, it would, its ripeness and perfection attained, have taken to itself wings and sailed fluffily off upon the breeze to renew its life perhaps a thousand miles from here. Seeing it float through the air a poet might have found it a theme for a sonnet. A scientist might have seen universal law embodied in its structure, or a seer have reasoned from it to life eternal.
Yet, but for the co-operation of its fellows in the body floral, it could not have lived any more than, save for its fellows, what we know as the dandelion could have lived. The law of co-operation, like all of Nature’s laws, makes for rightness and fitness all along the line
She teaches us, with ever-repeated emphasis, the lesson of independence of kind. The isolated being is, everywhere, the comparatively helpless being. The tree growing by itself in the open field often attains to more symmetrical perfection and beauty than the tree in the crowded forest, but woodmen tell us that the forest tree makes better timber
We must live with and for our fellows, but he does this best who, in the quiet order of the common life, opens widest his soul to the Source thereof, and growing to the full stature of a man helps on to perfection what should be that composite flower of the race, our human civilization.
