Once more their weird laughter of the loons comes to my ear, the distance lends it a musical, melancholy sound. For a dangerous ledge off the lighthouse island floats in on the still air the gentle trolling of a warning bell as it swings on the rocking buoy; it might be tolling for the passing of summer and sweet weather with that persistent, pensive chime.

When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before any one is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness.

It is curious that the leaf should so love the light and the root so hate it.

Like the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest, the true lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to happiness in this vale of tears, to a certain amount of the purest joy that earth can giver her children, joy that is tranquil, innocent, uplifting, unfailing.

This very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful. I always do it with a joy that is largely mixed with awe.

The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception.

I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else.