I am growing bolder as I write.  I think it requires not only youth, but genius, to read this paper.  I don’t mean to imply that it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.  It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is given by a common school education.  So much I do claim.  But here I have related, at length, a string of trivialities.  You must have the imagination of a poet to transfigure them.  These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.

My hand trembles when I offer you this.  Many times I have come bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless.  And yet—­and yet—­it is something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule.  Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences that differed from those of others only in details seemingly trifling.  All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best of things.  I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-"studded” school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.

Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that white-pine pail and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and just so of my special relationships with other things and with my race.  One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—­but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.