46S Massachusetts Horticultural Society. 



was there combined a greater variety of delightful circumstances. It would 

 be difficult to decide for which of our senses you have provided the most 

 luxurious repast. Fruit, flowers, music, fair faces and sparkling eyes; 

 wit, eloquence and poetry, have all conspired to lend their peculiar enchant- 

 ment to the hour. 



But it would be doing great injustice to your Association to estimate its 

 claims upon the consideration and gratitude of the community, by the suc- 

 cess of its exhibitions or the brilliancy of its festivals. We owe them a far 

 deeper debt for their influence in disseminating a taste for one of,the purest 

 and most refined pleasures of life, and for their exertions in diff"using the 

 knowledge of an art so eminently calculated to elevate the moral character 

 of society. 



Horticulture does little to supply the physical wants of man. The great 

 crops and harvests by which the world is fed, are the products of a sterner 

 treatment of the soil — ever-honored Agriculture, always the first of arts. 

 But " man does not live by bread alone." There is food for the soul, the 

 mind, the heart, no less essential to his true subsistence, required not mere- 

 ly by the educated and refined, but by all who have souls, minds or hearts 

 within them. And whence can the toiling millions of our race obtain a 

 more abundant or a more wholesome supply of this food than from the beau- 

 ties of nature as developed at their own doors, beneath their own feet, and 

 by their own hands, by the exquisite processes of horticulture ? 



It has been said that an undevout astronomer is mad. But we need not 

 look up to the skies for incentives to devotion. We need not employ tele- 

 scopes to find evidence of Beneficence. There are 



" Stars of the morning, dew drops, -which the Sun 

 Impearls on every leaf and every flower," 



whose lessons are legible to the unassisted eye. The flowers themselves, 

 with their gorgeous hues and inimitable odors, and which seem, in the econ- 

 omy of nature, to have no other object but to minister to the gratification 

 and delight of man, — who can resist their quiet teachings? What com- 

 panions are they to those who will only take them into their company, and 

 cherish their society, and listen to their charming voices ! Who ever parts 

 from them without pain, that has once experienced their disinterested and 

 delightful friendship ? 



I know not, in the whole range of ancient or modern poetry, a strain more 

 touching or more true to nature, than that in which the great English bard 

 has presented Eve bidding farewell to her flowers : — 



" Oh flowers, 

 That never will in other climate grow, 

 Mj' early visitation, and my last 

 At even, which I bred up with tender hand 

 From the first opening bud, and gave ye names ! 

 Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank 

 Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount ?" 



We know not what were these flowers, that never could in other climates 

 grow. We may know hereafter. But such as we have, there are daugh- 

 ters of Eve here present, I doubt not, with whom, to be deprived of them, 

 would well-nigh partake of the bitterness of a Paradise lost. 



