Why flows the pine’s nectareous juice?
Why shines with paint the linnet’s wing?
For sustenance alone? for use?
For preservation?”...
An art-poet significantly and suggestively writes, in lines to which the contributory reader, must, on his part, supply readings as it were between the lines:
“This wild white rose-bud in my hand hath meanings meant for me alone,
Which no one else can understand: to you it breathes with altered tone;
How shall I class its properties for you? or its wise whisperings
Interpret? Other eyes and ears it teaches many other things.”
The dull of hearing and seeing, it teaches very little. Josiah the curate, in Colonel Hamley’s tale, finds nothing suggestive in a rose in a buttonhole—not that he lacks interest in the flower in what he thinks its proper place. He never, he owns, could see any possible affinity between flowers and broadcloth; and why people should pluck blossoms from the stems and leaves that harmonize so well with them, to stick them into a dingy produce of the loom, he holds to be one of the puzzles of humanity. But Josiah is indulgent to that sister Rosa of his, who confessedly resembles the lilies in so far that she toils not, neither does she spin; and who, idle child, seems to think human beings ought to be content with merely blooming.