It was thousands of years afterward that one said, “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly…. Death is swallowed up in victory.”
The grass of the field may image forth the secular side of human life, but it can go no further than the grave. Beyond that it cannot point. Only one garden ever was that set forth the sure hope of immortality. “In the place where He was crucified, there was a garden…. There laid they Jesus.”
XVIII.
DANDELIONS.
June 8th.
There are many charms connected with the ideal life of the tropics. The chief drawback is, that manhood deliquesces and runs out under the equator. This is not paid for by luscious bananas, oranges, orchids, or ever-blooming vines and trees. Enjoyment palls when it flows unceasingly and without break. To live in summer forever, without one ungarlanded hour in the year, might, for aught we know, sate us with sweetness.
The tropics were not made to live in all the year. They are a refuge for one or two months. After frost and snow have had their full meal, and the northern winds have by familiarity bred contempt and influenzas, it is a good thing to go to sleep on the good steamer Moro Castle, and wake up in Cuba, or Jamaica, or to go on through the Gulf of Mexico to the Magdalena valley in Northern South America, which the painter Church once told me he regarded as the most perfect climate that he had ever found in all travels.
But as soon as the contrast is satisfied, we are sure that one in the tropics must long for the northern zones, northern fruits and northern flowers; for calm days without pestilent insects; for grass, and for DANDELIONS!
Now I have got upon my real subject. The foregoing sentences were in the nature of a rhetorical introduction,—a sly and adroit way of getting people to listen to the praises of one of the brightest charms of our northern spring days.