266 ARBOR DAY 



revealed to us by a few rents in the sky. The 

 miraculous harmonies of light at play, ceaselessly 

 inventing new gaieties, reveling in itself, would be 

 unknown to us; for the flowers first broke up the 

 prism and made the most subtle portion of our sight. 

 And the magic garden of perfumes who would 

 have opened its gate to us? A few grasses, a few 

 gums, a few fruits, the breath of the dawn. The 

 smell of the night and the sea, would have told us 

 that beyond our eyes and ears there existed a shut 

 paradise where the air which we breathe changes into 

 delights for which we could have found no name. 

 Consider also all that the voice of human happiness 

 would lack! One of the blessed heights of our 

 soul would be almost dumb, if the flowers had not, 

 since centuries, fed with their beauty the language 

 which we speak and the thoughts that endeavor 

 to crystallize the most precious hours of life. The 

 whole vocabulary, all the impressions of love, are 

 impregnate with their breath, nourished with their 

 smile. When we love, all the flowers that we have 

 seen and smelt seem to hasten within us to people 

 with their known charms the consciousness of a 

 sentiment whose happiness, but for them, would have 

 no more form than the horizons of the sea or sky. 

 They have accumulated within us, since our child- 

 hood, and even before it, in the soul of our fathers, 

 an immense treasure, the nearest to our joys, upon 

 which we draw each time that we wish to make 



