retribution of the flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecution
of man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
inconsiderable brain.

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to the
smallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns is
no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory
author by the phrase. In literature as in all else man merits his
subjection to trivialities by his economical greed. A condition for
using justly and gaily any decoration would seem to be a measure of
reluctance. Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world
decivilized--was in the beginning intended to be something jocund; and
jocundity was never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, and
modesty. Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in
dispute. For Nature has something even more severe than modertion: she
has an innumerable singleness. Her buttercup meadows are not prodigal;
they show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly
the disgrace of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his
delights? or who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his
wishes--the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous
Fate that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her
answer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day
when she shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and
make it perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for
novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the
last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
mouth are all numbered.