TRANSACTIONS 01" NORTHERN ILL. HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 299 



young they will become adepts in planting, transplanting, weeding, and 

 watering flowers. They will become familiar with their names and habits, 

 and delight in them as the more experienced cannot. Very few who are 

 early trained to the cultivation of fruits and flowers can be allured from 

 it by the idle and ignorant. Idle dreaming, foolish jesting, and injudi- 

 cious reading, will have little fascination for them. Our most elegantly 

 furnished homes fail to yield the pleasure anticipated, for the reason that 

 the eye wearies of inert beauty and elegance. 'I'he feet may press the 

 carpets of rarest patterns and finest texture ; upholstery be of softest 

 velvet; the walls hung with jiaintings, executed by the old masters; 

 statuary adorn the halls, and yet the spirit unsatisfied. Flowers furnish 

 variety and change. Some writer has said, that in order to be hai)py we 

 must have something to do, something to love, something to hope for. 



They also furnish these requisites. They are to a home what fruit is 

 to the feast, music to the social gathering. The sculptor thrills with 

 delight as he developes his form of ideal loveliness from the marble block; 

 also the artist, as stroke after stroke of his brush, i)laces upon the canvas 

 some real or ideal woodland scene, with its green -hills, its mountains 

 mantled with their hazy blue, the flower-spangled valley with its little 

 brooklet meandering through, or the i)eaceful lake reflecting the moss- 

 covered rocks and bending willows with their long, wavy plumes. At 

 best, these are but imitations of the work of the Great Artist, while every 

 blossom is fresh from the storehouse of infinite beauty, inimitable in form, 

 in the delicate feature of its leaves, in the blending of its hues, and, more 

 than all, in its fragrance, commanding reverential worship from all spirits 

 in harmony with the Divine attribute of beauty. The cultivation of 

 flowers arouses a desire to investigate nature in all her varied manifesta- 

 tions, to understand the laws by which all this beauty is developed. Who- 

 ever listens to her interior voice has food for the mind at all times, and 

 under every circumstance. 



It is an ever-open volume through which all true wisdom may be de- 

 rived. To such there can be no stronger attraction than is found in the 

 dee}) woodland shadows; what eloquence, what melodies borne on the 

 silvery wings of the fragrant air; surpassing the finest oratory; sweeter 

 than the poet's song; holier than the voice of prophecy; more beautiful 

 than the halls of art. 



The everlasting hills and flower-gemmed valleys speak. The whole 

 universe has its divine language, its million pages of celestial eloquence. 

 How blest the silent inspiration of such a retreat, where the noise and 

 discord of a world is lost in the conscious rapture of an interior life, and 

 the soul holds converse with the wise and pure of all ages; with the 

 exalted minds and loving hearts that have left their footprints on the 

 sands of time as beacon lights to us. 



Several members spoke of the esthetic value of floriculture and horti- 

 culture. The plan of introduc ing the theory and practice, to a limited 

 extent, of these branches into our common schools was favorably pre- 

 sented and received. The experiment of planting beautiful evergreens on 



