380 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 
ing innocence into an autumn world recall Hans 
Andersen’s pathetic story of the ‘‘ Sommer Gowk.”’ 
It is the Danish popular name for the snowdrop 
—‘‘the summer-fool ’’—cheated by false hopes of 
summer into the clutches of present winter. The 
‘‘Sommer Gowk’’ is chilled and beaten down 
by a shower of sleet, and gets hardly a glimpse 
of sunshine, and no summer at all. And yet in 
the South, ‘‘ over the hills and far away,’’ summer 
is filling all the fields with sunshine — summer 
fair and real—and drawing nearer day by day. 
The ‘‘ Sommer Gowk,’’ says Andersen, is like the 
noble souls born into a world as yet unfit to re- 
ceive them. The prophets who gave their high 
spiritual message to ears dulled by sensuality or 
sloth, the poets who had no recognition save from 
posterity, the reformers, persecuted or laughed at 
by their own age, but honored by a later one— 
were they not Sommer Gowks, one and all? And 
science, too, has had its Sommer Gowks, for all 
its great schemes, from the discovery of America 
to zrial navigation, have seemed dreams in their 
day. 
But ‘‘ the world’s dreamers have been its bene- 
factors.’’ And so in the November violets we may 
see a reminder of those who, in dark days and in 
