OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS 



the flowers had not, since centuries, fed with their beauty the 

 language which we speak and the thoughts that endeavour to 

 crystallize the most precious hours of life. The whole vo- 

 cabulary, all the impressions of love are impregnate with their 

 breath, nourished with their smile. When we love, the 

 memories of all the flowers that we have seen and smelt 

 hasten to people with their recognized charms the conscious- 

 ness of a feeling whose happiness, but for them, would have no 

 more form than the horizon of the sea or sky. They have ac- 

 cumulated within us, since our childhood and even before it, 

 in the souls of our fathers, an immense treasure, the nearest 

 to our joys, upon which we draw each time that we wish to 

 make more real the clement minutes of our life. They have 

 created and spread in our world of sentiment the fragrant at- 

 mosphere in which love delights. 



That is why I love above all the simplest, the commonest, 

 the oldest and the most antiquated: those which have a long 

 human past behind them, a large array of kind and consoling 

 actions ; those which have lived with us for hundreds of years 

 and which form part of ourselves, because they put something 



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