MOUNTAIN AND PRAIRIE MEET 91 
speedy mortalities? Nay, friend, the mountain 
is no ogre, but a man of high design. 
Mountain and prairie are friends. They work 
in wide companionship and homely comity. | 
They are met at parley like old friends. The 
poppy and the sunflower are at converse. 
How white the poppy is and thorny! The 
desert mountain has gotten into the poppy’s 
heart. It snarls and is ungracious to the touch, 
but is very fair to look upon. It has the white 
heart. Its blood is like liquid moonbeams and 
its face is like blooming starlight. It slumbers 
from sunset to sunrise and then like some fair 
maiden, arrayed in spotless white, walketh out 
at the daylight to greet its lord. I have seen 
mountain poppies as fast asleep, to all appear- 
ances, as a tired child and as altogether unwak- 
able, yet at the first kiss of the sun they would 
leap out into blooming like a resurrection. They 
too are children of the sun. They root them in 
the mountain loneliness and loveliness and wander 
out on the deserts below the mountain refuges; 
but they know their king. They are not children 
of the night, but children of the light and of 
the day. From sun’s going to sun’s coming, 
they are dim and remote from all the things 
that breathe and sing. They could hear no 
whippoorwill at song if one came and sang 
beneath their lattice. “My lady sleeps” (in 
Poe’s poem). But when the Lover comes and 
leans and kisses her pale lips, then does this 
