132 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
set pours its divine light and here may one be- 
hold the silver sickle of the new-made moon 
shining quiet and strange from under the world 
as if it were rising from what Tennyson has 
named “the under world.” In the June sunshine 
lay the pond fenced in by hedges of the somnolent 
grasses. 
The high sky was in the pond, though a patch- 
work sky it was, for the trivial water was sown 
to white water lilies. What poetry have we 
here on a stretch of prairie! A lily pond with 
pads lying quiet in the unemotional water and 
the lilies floating, slumbrous at noon. White 
boats with golden centers watching straight up 
into the topmost sky. 
Can anybody look at water lilies with a sun- 
less look? I wot not. I do know one man who 
cannot. That, at least, is not in the list of his 
inabilities. He looks at the lily and the lily has 
its way with his soul. God did a thing the day 
he invented the water lily. I wish I had been 
there. He did it at the daydawn, I surmise, 
when the dews were making rain from the cedars 
and wee rivulets were forming on the ground, 
rivulets of dew slipping out toward the sea, 
some sea, some hidden sea remote. What a day 
of artistry that was, the birthday of the water 
lily!’ Mayhap we shall hear about that day in 
paradise. O paradise! 
How long any seeing soul could gloat over a 
prairie pond flowered out to water lilies with 
