THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS 31 
however slight, must make the floral period con- 
tinuous to the imagination ; while our year gives 
a pause and an interval to its children, and after 
exhausted October has effloresced into Witch- 
hazel, there is an absolute reserve of blossom 
until the Alders wave again. 
No symbol could so well represent Nature’s 
first yielding in springtime as this blossoming 
of the Alder, the drooping of the tresses of 
these tender things. Before the frost is gone, 
and while the new-born season is yet too weak 
to assert itself by actually uplifting anything, it 
can at least let fall these blossoms, one by one, 
till they wave defiance to the winter on a thou- 
sand boughs. How patiently they have waited ! 
Men are perplexed with anxieties about their 
own immortality; but these catkins, which 
hang, almost full-formed, above the ice all win- 
ter, show no such solicitude, though when 
March wooes them they are ready. Once re- 
laxing, their pollen is so prompt to fall that it 
sprinkles your hand as you gather them; then, 
for one day, they are the perfection of grace 
upon your table, and next day they are weary 
and emaciated, and their little contribution to 
the spring is done. 
Then many eyes watch for the opening of 
the Mayflower, day by day, and a few for the 
Hepatica. So marked and fantastic are the 
