gaudiness of pink blossoms; still they are respectable, even if they
afford us only an apple or two in a season. Those few apples--or,
at all events, the remembrance of apples in bygone years--are the
atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands for the privilege
of lengthened life. Human flower-shrubs, if they will grow old on
earth, should, besides their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of
fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites, else neither man nor the
decorum of nature will deem it fit that the moss should gather on
them.

One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white
sheet of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay
hidden beneath it. Nature is not cleanly according to our
prejudices. The beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown
and blighted deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the
present hour. Our avenue is strewn with the whole crop of autumn's
withered leaves. There are quantities of decayed branches which one
tempest after another has flung down, black and rotten, and one or
two with the ruin of a bird's-nest clinging to them. In the garden
are the dried bean-vines, the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and
melancholy old cabbages which were frozen into the soil before their
unthrifty cultivator could find time to gather them. How
invariably, throughout all the forms of life, do we find these
intermingled memorials of death! On the soil of thought and in the
garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, he withered
leaves,--the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is no
wind strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not
garner then from our sight. What mean they? Why may we not be
permitted to live and enjoy, as if this were the first life and our
own the primal enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry