"Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold."
And again in the second stanza:—
"'Tis the Spring's largess which she scatters now
To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand."
In the succeeding stanzas he calls to mind how the dandelion suggests the riches of the tropics, the full promise of summer, the pure joys of childhood, the common loving courtesies of life, the rich love and prodigality of nature, and the divinity in every human heart.
When by reflection we bind all these thoughts together, and find that they focus in the idea that the best riches abound and even burst forth out of common things and from the hearts of common men and women, we realize that the poet has brought us to the point of discovering a deep and practical truth, which, put to work in the world, would bring rhythm and harmony into human life.
But such a deep impression is not made by a superficial or fragmental study of the poem.
A somewhat similar result may be wrought out by the study of Lowell's poem, "An Incident in a Railroad Car," and the idea is well expressed in the verse:—
"Never did poesy appear
So full of heaven to me as when
I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear
To lives of coarsest men."
The study of a poem or other masterpiece in this way, to get at its inner life and continuity, reveals to us an interesting process of mental elaboration and comparative thought. Such self-active reflection is the subsoiling of the mind.