EFFECT OF AN EARLY FROST. 



mortality, that it could not be passed by without 

 viewing it as an admonition, a display of what had 

 been, and is. There had occurred during the night 

 a severe white frost ; and, standing by a greenhouse 

 filled with verdure, fragrance, arid blossom, I was 

 surrounded in every direction by the parents of all 

 this gaiety, in blackness, dissolution, and decay. 

 But the very day before, they had attracted the 

 most merited admiration and delight by the splen- 

 dour of their bloom and the vigour of their growth ; 

 but now just touched by the icy finger of the night, 

 they had become a mass of unsightly ruins and 

 confusion. Once the gay belles of the parterre, 

 they fluttered their hour, a generation of existent 

 loveliness; their youthful successors, unpermitted 

 to mingle with them, peeped from their retreats 

 above, seeming almost to repine at their confine- 

 ment ; they have bloomed their day, another race 

 succeeds, and their hour will be accomplished too. 

 This was so perfectly in unison with the shifting 

 scenes of life, the many changes of the hour, that 

 it seemed inseparably connected with a train of 

 reflection, with the precepts which all nature points 

 out her still small whisperings for the ears of 

 those that can hear them. 



We grieve over the wreck of nature, the con- 

 fusion, the ruin of the beautiful products of our 

 floral hours, the departure of those who have been 

 so pleasing to us, with whom we have walked in 

 perfect innocence of life ; we look for them, and 



