Of
course, I have said nothing about the berries. They live in another and
more ideal region: except, perhaps, the currant. Here we see that, even
among berries, there are degrees of breeding. The currant is well
enough, clear as truth, and exquisite in color; but I ask you to notice
how far it is from the exclusive _hauteur_ of the aristocratic
strawberry, and the native refinement of the quietly elegant raspberry.
I do not know that chemistry, searching for protoplasm, is able to
discover the tendency of vegetables. It can only be found out by outward
observation. I confess that I am suspicious of the bean, for instance.
There are signs in it of an unregulated life. I put up the most
attractive sort of poles for my Limas. They stand high and straight,
like church-spires, in my theological garden,--lifted up; and some of
them have even budded, like Aaron's rod. No church-steeple in a New
England village was ever better fitted to draw to it the rising
generation on Sunday than those poles to lift up my beans towards
heaven. Some of them did run up the sticks seven feet, and then
straggled off into the air in a wanton manner; but more than half of
them went galivanting off to the neighboring grape-trellis, and wound
their tendrils with the tendrils of the grape, with a disregard of the
proprieties of life which is a satire upon human nature. And the grape
is morally no better. I think the ancients, who were not troubled with
the recondite mystery of protoplasm, were right in the mythic union of
Bacchus and Venus.
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