SUGGESTIVENESS 207 



rolling field than a lawn, a winding road than, a 

 straight one. In literature perspective, indirection, 

 understatement, side glimpses, have equal value ; a 

 vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the 

 writer, sentences that start a multitude of images, 

 that abound in the concrete and the specific, that 

 shun vague generalities, — with these go the power 

 of suggestiveness. 



Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, 

 while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the per- 

 fected afford us a difierent kind of pleasure. The 

 art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and 

 the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has 

 another. All beginnings in nature afibrd us a pe- 

 culiar pleasure. The early spring with its hints 

 and dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first 

 robin or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first 

 tender skies, the first rainbow, the first wild flower, 

 the dropping bud scales, the awakening voices in 

 the marshes, — all these things touch and move us 

 in a way that later developments in the season do not. 

 What meaning, too, in the sunrise and the sunset, in 

 the night with its stars, the sea with its tides and 

 currents, the morning with its dews, autumn with 

 its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its 

 sands, — in everything in the germ and in the bud, 

 — in parasites, suckers, blights, in floods, tempests, 

 droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the 

 falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have 

 a tongue, the pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust, 

 conveys a hint of the method of nature. 



