130 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



scarcely to be seen. And why so ? Because flowers were to fulfil a mis- 

 sion of moral poesy and truth, and to fill the soul of man with beauty ; 

 but until he should come to inhabit a world which was henceforth to 

 be his own, flowers were not needed, and hence did not exist. Then, 

 when the fulness of time had come for him to take up his abode on 

 the world which had just burst into new life, he was to wake, as it 

 were, into an existence surfeited with loveliness ; for " the Lord God 

 planted a Garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man to dress 

 it and to keep it." And so the great mover of the universe has boun- 

 tifully given us these perfumed forms of loveliness, as teachers of love 

 and faith, and to fill the heart with beauty and with joy. Oh ! man, 

 without flowers thy days would be as the barren dust of the desert, 

 and nature would spurn thee, instead of wooing thee to kiss her and 

 love her as a bride. Learn then, how, amid blood-stained revolutions, 

 and the overthrow of empires, amid the destruction of palaces and 

 lofty columns, and statues of marble and of bronze, the simple flowers 

 of the field bloom on, and grow again and again into new beauty, and 

 multiply for ever. The spots where temples and altars have stood, 

 and where throbbing hearts have bowed fervently at the shrines of 

 God, become at last green mounds of grass and ivy, and wild daisies 

 and tangled copses of roses and brambles ; for time, who hurls down 

 the strong battlement and buries the consecrated shrine in dust, can- 

 not stop the blooming of the humble flower which grows upon the 

 ruined keep, or between the crumbling stones of the fallen tower. 

 Though he may dig the graves of nations, and hurl the proudest 

 monument to ruin, yet spring comes again to the spot made sacred by 

 memories of the past, and scatters flowers in profusion as tokens of the 

 supremacy of nature. 



Then no longer, man ! like Dido of old, make a fire for thine 

 own immolation ; look not so far through gloom and darkness for a 

 shining Eden; for flowers — emblems of all love and charity — are 

 blooming at thy very feet ! Learn to live like Plato, ever in the con- 

 templation of the FIRST GOOD and the first fair, and to die like 

 Goethe, asking for increase of light ! Then shall thy soul awaken 

 to a life more beauteous and fair, to a land of green pastures where 

 the wrecks of autumn are unknown, where the chills of winter fall 

 not, but where perpetual summer blooms, with its plenitude of odorous 

 flowers, imder the sustaining breath of the Eternal. And as the 



