Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom.
It often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take away the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and enterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it merits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas.
The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom.
The work of his foster-brother, the artisan, has certainly been well done. The structures we have been traversing are, in their way, works of art very worthy, if not the choicest conceivable, blossoms of our century-plant. For fitness, the quality that underlies beauty throughout Nature from the plume to the tendril and the petal, they have not been surpassed in their kind.
We may call them weeds, but forever blessed be the hardy, rapid-growing, ever-ready plants we name so scornfully! What else could so quickly answer the mother's purpose? She had not time to evolve a century-plant, or elaborate an oak-tree, before man would be upon it again. She did the best she could, and the result was wonderful.
But in the midst grows silently the century-plant of the soul, absorbing to itself hourly that which feeds the beauty of the lily and the radiance of the leaf, waiting only for the hundred years of its shrouding to be over! Miss Craydocke never came in from the woods and rocks without her trophies.
So, while we have been expecting the American Literature to come out from some locality, neat and clean, like a nugget, or, to change the figure, to bloom any day like a century-plant, in one striking, fragrant expression of American life, behold something else has been preparing and maturing, larger and more promising than our early anticipations.
O aloe-flower upon her brow! Of what strange birth-pangs breathest thou, The while we gaze with dreamy eyes Back o'er a sea of memories, And see thy seed of foreign skies Here washt, to spring beneath our sun And ripen till its bloom is won! What storms have rocked thy stem aslant, O changeful-nurtured Century-Plant! Whose living flower now opens bland Its kindly promise o'er the land! With blood and tears 'twas watered, The bud whose blossom now is spread A floral cap her head upon, Who,
For the rest, if there is really that present liking for Americans in England, which we must wish to touch with all delicacy as the precious bloom of a century-plant at last coming to flower, the explanation may be sought perhaps in an effect of the English nature to which I shall not be the one to limit it. They have not substantially so much as phenomenally changed towards us.
So, while we have been expecting the American Literature to come out from some locality, neat and clean, like a nugget, or, to change the figure, to bloom any day like a century-plant, in one striking, fragrant expression of American life, behold something else has been preparing and maturing, larger and more promising than our early anticipations.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking