The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like
grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and
brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked
the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in
her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there
still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the
elms and rooted in the matted turf.
Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as
that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a
whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard,
insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This intussusception
of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among
the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the
thinking centre itself.
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