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Dead Leaves. 
(MELANCHOLY.) 
“ Ah me ! a leaf with sighs can wring 
My lips asunder.” 
E. B. Browning. 
N EVER did the florigraphist select from nature a more 
appropriate interpreter of man’s innermost passions 
than when he chose dead leaves as representative of melancholy. 
Never did poet utter a more profound truth than he who said, 
“When we are sad, to sadness we apply 
Each plant, and flower, and leaf that meets the eye.” 
True sadness so intensifies—it might be said so exaggerates 
—the meaning of everything beheld through its misty veil, 
that we fancy all that is seen is connected with our own es¬ 
pecial sorrow; gradually grow egotistical in our grief; and then 
finally—so beautifully does the machinery of this existence 
“ work together for good ”—by the very self-contemplation 
which appeared calculated to perpetuate our melancholy, for¬ 
get it, or rather perceive that it leaves behind nothing but 
soothing memories. It does not require a poet to discover 
“ that there is a lesson in each leaf;” the youth or maid whom 
melancholy hath marked for its own will speedily read and com¬ 
prehend the silent monitor. But how different may be the 
purport of a single leaf! To one it may merely be a frail record 
of the passing pleasure of a thoughtless jest, and to another it 
may bear stern memories of irrecoverable happiness!—may 
indeed be able with sighs to wring our lips asunder! 
But as Westby Gibson, the peasant bard of Sherwood, in 
his fine poem of “ Dead Leaves,” says, 
“ Be this as it may, the flow’r and the leaf— 
The types of all that is sweet and fair— 
Are symbols alike of joy and grief;” 
and as such we must accept them. 
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