210 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



summer that has vanished away. They appeal to 

 that touching yearning for permanence which amid 

 the vain show in which we live has taken such a deep 

 hold of our hearts. In them our affections find an 

 eddy in which time plays as it were with its own 

 seasons, and the ever-flowing stream of progress dim- 

 ples upon itself. They afford an anchor to our hearts 

 by which they may be steadied for a little amid the 

 incessant change and the bewildering whirl of things. 

 And how appropriately do these never-withering 

 flowers form wreaths for the dead ! The lush life-full 

 flowers of summer are associated with the tragedies, 

 the silences, the heart-breaks of life, and come in 

 with their own voiceless unconfuted arguments fresh 

 as it were from the Creator's heart, when human 

 words are vain, and even music fails to touch a chord, 

 to tell us that the power within all silences and pains 

 and tragedies is love, and that the possibilities of 

 life are endless. Save for the wonderful flower-facts 

 before us we could never have dreamed that such 

 beauty lurked in the dark earth, was latent in the 

 dry root or tiny seed. And so we bring these fair 

 summer flowers to the sick-room and the bedside of 

 the dying, and place them around the known unknown 

 face so pathetic in its white patience, and lay them 

 on the green mound which is all that belongs now 

 to our beloved ones of the beauty and glory of the 

 world. But they wither and pass away like what we 

 loved and lost ; on them too is written the doom of 

 mortality ; they seem more akin to the decay of the 



