In my Nature Notebook...

"Mulleins and Mulleins

Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields-at first earth's big rosettes in their broadleav'd low cluster-plants, eight, ten, twenty leaves to a plant-plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the fences- then close to the ground, but soon springing up-leaves as broad as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long-so fresh and dewy in the morning-stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high. The famers, I find, think the mullein a mean unworthy weed, but I have grown to a fondness for it. Every object has its lesson, enclosing the suggestion of everything else-and lately I sometimes think all is consecrated for me in these hardy, yellow-flower'd weeds. As I come down the lane early in the morning, I pause before their soft wool-like fleece and stem and broad leaves, glittering with countless diamonds.  Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently return'd together; at such long intervals I stand or sit among them, musing-and woven with the rest, of so many hours and moods of partial rehabilitation-of my sane or sick spirit, here as near at peace as it can be.  - Walt Whitman