into many wonderful and diverse regions. It seems to me that
there am two ways in which you may give unity to a book of
stories. You may stay in one place and write about different
themes, preserving always the colour of the same locality. Or
you may go into different places and use as many of the colours
and shapes of life as you can really see in the light of the same
thought.

There is such a thought in this book. It is the idea of
the search for inward happiness, which all men who are really
alive are following, along what various paths, and with what
different fortunes! Glimpses of this idea, traces of this
search, I thought that I could see in certain tales that were
in my mind,--tales of times old and new, of lands near and far
away. So I tried to tell them, as best as I could, hoping
that other men, being also seekers, might find some meaning in
them.

There are only little, broken chapters from the long story
of life. None of them is taken from other books. Only one of
them--the story of Winifried and the Thunder-Oak--has the
slightest wisp of a foundation in fact or legend. Yet I think
they are all true.

But how to find a name for such a book,--a name that will tell
enough to show the thought and yet not too much to leave it free?
I have borrowed a symbol from the old
German poet and philosopher, Novalis, to stand instead of a
name. The Blue Flower which he used in his romance of
Heinrich von Ofterdingen to symbolise Poetry, the object of