|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a
tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot
whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It
is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will
listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments, - not
with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but
by the same hand and from the same palette.
I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
the blue hyacinth which I have, - very certainly not for the
crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they
are. You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves,
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |