THE LOVE OF FLOWERS. 129 



sudden sense of renovated childhood, which seems to me one of the 

 mysteries of our being." 



Flowers are such living types of loveliness and innocence, and of all 

 that is pleasing and graceful, that the poet would be bereft of his most 

 beautiful images if they were to perish. "We must cease, says Mr. 

 Adams, to compare young lips to blushing roses, and white brows to 

 unspotted lilies. We must cease to regard winning eyes as violets 

 half hidden under broad leaves, but peeping out in the sunshine to 

 laugh right merrily. The sweet voice of her we love would no longer 

 be as a soft breeze, kissing its way through twined roses or sheltered 

 hawthorns. We could no longer welcome the young soul into the 

 world with tokens of flowers, or make the graves of the beloved holy 

 and beautiful by green hillocks and sprinkKngs of blossoms, and which 

 are emblems to us of the eternal summer beyond the grave, where 

 amid the starry fields of that world of beauty, flowers bloom on for 

 ever, and never — never fade ! 



The physical history of our world teaches us that flowers were 

 created for spiritual, rather than material purposes. They were sent 

 by God to give us constant revelations of the beautiful, and to keep 

 us in the perpetual presence of innocence and virtue. Geology tells 

 us that in those dim and distant eras of our world's history, prior to 

 the creation of man, the earth was peopled with mighty monsters, and 

 strange moving forms, and dense black forest jungles. Then the 

 mammoth and the mastodon shook the old woods with their ponderous 

 footsteps. There were giant ferns waving their rich green fronds in 

 the morning air, tall trees of every hue and shade, uplifting their 

 heads proudly to the blue heaven. Brakes and brackens matted and 

 interwoven, and tenanted by the jackal, the shaggy bison, and the 

 sabre-toothed tiger. There were deep forest fastnesses where the 

 luxuriant trees locked themselves together overhead, and were clothed 

 with foliage so thick and close, that the sunlight never pierced through 

 them ; but a dim twilight shadow reigned about the massive boles, and 

 the ground below, where the fallen leaves were piled in thick masses, 

 was at mid-day enveloped in the gloom of night. Yet, although there 

 were birds of gorgeous plumage, and trees and shrubs in unnumbered 

 forms of greatness and majesty, there were no lovely flowers ! All the 

 blossoms which grew in the subterranean forests of the then half- 

 formed world were destitute of beauty, or like those of ferns or mosses. 



