Clip, clip, go
the long, scythe-like shears, and with every clip down comes a branch
with its thousand songs unsung, or a shoot with its half-blown promise
of spring. Cut away earnestly, patiently. You have your faith to help
you; and though your eyes are of the strongest and keenest, you have
never been taught to use them. Cut away till your arms ache and your
head swims with the strain of measuring angles and inches and pyramids
and obelisks; Nature is working at the root while you are warring on the
branches. True, the birds will not build where your shears have passed;
and the winds will wail where they would have piped it merrily, if the
young boughs had been there to dance to their breathings. But the roots
are tough and the trunks are strong, and the sap wells surely up from
those mysterious sources where, in darkness and silence, Nature works
her wondrous transformations,--proving, through each waxing and waning
year, by bud and leaf and branch, that, thwart and mutilate and deny her
as you may, she is the same kind mother still.
As life advances, the dividing lines grow sharper and more defined.
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