Vv 
ON MY FIRST FINDING TRAILING 
ARBUTUS 
OWEVER old a friend any wild flower 
H may be, the coming on it is at each time 
adiscovery. You cannot think it old and 
much less can you feel it old. It is a new thing 
under the sun. And if this is how we feel with a 
flower long known, how shall we feel when we find 
a flower of which poets have dreamed without 
weariness, whose poetry is perennial—and find 
it for the first time? My necessities of livelihood 
had kept me in zones not frequented by the 
trailing arbutus, so that when I was foot loose 
on long wandering in those belts where the faint 
yet pungent perfume of this flower of advent 
has its home, it was long past the time of its 
blooming. Its trail of clumsy vine and its pres- 
sure of coarse, thick leaf I had often seen lying 
sprawling close against the ground, but the 
flowering of it was to me a thing of faith. I saw 
through the poet’s eyes and inhaled perfume 
through the poet’s verses, and the “May flower,” 
so far as visible bloom on the wildwood floor 
where it bloomed into beatitude, was remote 
as a myth. 
32 
