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

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.

As I hold the flower in my hand and think of trying to describe it, I realize how poor a creature I am, how impotent are words in the presence of such perfection.

O happy, happy morning! O dear, familiar place! / O warm, sweet tears of Heaven, fast falling on my face! / O well-remembered, rainy wind, blow all my care away, / That I may be a child again this blissful morn of May.

When the snow is still blowing against the window-pane in January and February and the wild winds are howling without, what pleasure it is to plan for summer that is to be.

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.

As I work among my flowers, I find myself talking to them, reasoning and remonstrating with them, and adoring them as if they were human beings. Much laughter I provoke among my friends by so doing, but that is of no consequence. We are on such good terms, my flowers and I.