STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



75 



and vexation and discouragement follow. Eternal vigilance, high-minded 

 and large-hearted counsel and assistance are imperatively demanded. 

 The members of this Society have a high commission to perform and the 

 Society itself an exalted permission to be instrumental in adding to the 

 fruitful wealth of our glorious State, whereby an easy and abundant suste- 

 nance may be had of healthful and hopeful quality, for its teeming 

 thousands of the bravest hearts and fairest faces among the sons and 

 daughters of our race. 



The past has accomplished wonders ; the crab has become the apple, 

 the poisonous almond the peach, the dry and bitter colewort the cabbage 

 and the cauliflower, the woody spindles of the wild plants the nutritious 

 parsnip and carrot. The potato, now so universally used, became in 

 America an article of ordinary food since our war of independence. Is 

 the future to do less? Is our better science and higher art to fail for want 

 of devotion? Let us rekindle the fires of our enthusiasm and go up and 

 possess in its fullness the goodly land. 



But, after all, it is not natural wealth that makes a State. It is not 

 the richness of the fields, the fullness of the forests, the treasures of the 

 mines, it is not the beauty of the landscape nor the freshness of the 

 atmosphere that makes earth valuable and man contented and happy. 



"Cellars and granaries in vain we fill » 



With all the bounteous summer's store, 

 If the mind thirsts and .hungers still — 



The poor rich man's emphatically poor." CoWLEV. 



Human nature requires more than bodily necessities and comforts. 

 Man shall not live by bread alone. There is other food of a higher kind, 

 for the higher spiritual nature with which we are likewise endowed. The 

 hunger of the soul is as real as that of the body, and its unsatisfied 

 cravings are as detrimental as bodily starvation to the onward and upward 

 progress of the race. In vain do we eat and drink, in vain are we clothed 

 and sheltered from the scorching sun and shivering storm, if the mind is 

 not awakened to a realization of the beauty and worth of its surroundings, 

 if the heart is not touched by the sweet influences of associations and 

 intimate acquaintance, if the aff'ections are not drawn out purified and 

 strengthened through daily exercise upon the ennobling and lovely things 

 of earth and heaven. To be supplied, however bountifully, with those 

 things which minister to the bare necessities of our physical lives, and 

 these alone, would render possible only a cramped and mean existence, 

 entirely unworthy of the Creator and of the creature made in his 

 image. 



Deprive us of the beauty which the eye drinks in from the natural 

 world, of the melody and harmony to which the ear attunes itself from 

 the groves and the valleys, of the fragrance of the flower-freighted air, 

 the breath of the morning, and especially of the associations which these 

 call up in the mind, and the aspirations which they kindle in the heart* — 

 deprive us of these and the world would be dark and dreary, life a burden 

 and immortality a dread. 



