Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

Here bloomed the black-eyed Susan and the white wild carrot, with its resinous odor, beneath the Chickasaw plum tree whose crimson fruit strewed, like blood-red agates, scattered by the hand of August, the dry bed of the creek, or glimpsed, like a dryad's lips, a luscious red, through

the intricate green of the boughs above. There the vervain with its ragged witch-wisps of weedy blossoms nodded at me from the dusty roadside together with the hot yellow eyes of the wild sunflowers and daisies. Seated upon a stone I said to myself,—"Love is the wizard's circle which circumscribes life; inside it, all the joys of Earth and Paradise: outside it, and beyond it, death and darkness and hell."