CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 503 
upon the heels of childhood, and many of us, in populous cities pent, 
know little more of flowers, except when some charitable country 
friend sends in a handful of the first offerings of spring ; and whilst 
all the town seems sleeping in cold frost and fog, enlivens our break- 
fast table with the modest and drooping snowdrop or the lively he- 
patica. Then, to be sure, summer comes, and each morning a fresh 
rose reminds us that the out-of-town world is as fragrant and lovely 
as ever: and it surprises and delights us to find, that when we are 
old enough to be beginning to surmise that all is vanit , the flowers 
grow more and more beautiful ; that every spring seems more ar- 
rayed in loveliness than the last ; whilst even the song of birds grows 
sweeter, and hath a more dying fall, when we quit our places of toil 
and meditate in the even-tide. And when old age comes, as come 
it will, who is there of us who does not fancy some calm inter- 
val between business and the grave, in which the care of our flowers, 
and gentle flirtations with the nightingale and thrush, or, in their ab- 
sence, with the pert but faithful robin, will form our chief delight. 
We entreat our youngest readers not to neglect or despise these 
pleasures in the time of their youth ; and when they are old they will 
not depart from them. Throughout all the years of life, be our sta- 
tion what it may, and our dreams of ambition ever so dazzling, few 
hours there are which leave so durable and so sweet an impression as 
those which are devoted to rambling along sequestered lanes with a 
few light-hearted and innocent children, stopping to look at every 
modest blossom, running to gather the various wonders of the com- 
mon grasses, and idly weaving garlands which deck the brow without 
bringing to it any ache or care. Happy are the children who enjoy 
these pleasures ; and happy they in whom the remembrance of them 
is so fresh that twenty suffocating summers in money-making cities 
have not dimmed its precious brightness, or unfitted the heart to re- 
flect it. Yet how often, when thus engaged, we have felt the want of 
a book which would tell us the names of some of the little lovely 
flowers which we loved, white and purple gems peeping forth beneath 
the hedge-row elms, or bolder stragglers leaping with wild luxuriance 
from branch to branch, as if the meaner shrubs were only made to 
set forth their greater beauty. Often, deluded by a captivating title, 
we have added botanical works to our children’s library ; but as often 
felt the bitterest disappointment. To turn from the flowers them- 
selves to the work of a botanist is, too generally, like turning from 
the living to the dead. On the one side, all is beauty and life; on 
the other, the coldness and rigidity of life extinct. One feels quite 
convinced that the botanist never saw a flower before it was pulled to 
pieces, and that all the names are invented to prevent botany from being 
made vulgar. These guides to botany are very satisfactory, doubtless, 
to those who know all about it ; but to those who are ignorant they 
teach nothing. In this respect, however, there has of late years been 
much improvement; and in the work before us we find exactly the book 
which we have so often wanted. Perhaps, instead of twelve beauti- 
