Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of
spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain? The
memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the
assurance of all the springs to come. They link us up with the pageant of
nature, and with the immortals of our kind--with Wordsworth watching them
in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet
image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them
"in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.

And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is
infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a
personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they
all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual
and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness
that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of
us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says
to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I
am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated
soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays
from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should
honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me,
together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and
the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in
the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of
nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree
bursting into blossom always unveils it again.

It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its
poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains
they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true