14 FLOWERS OF THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



spiritual experience, when the shrivelled heart, " on which tem- 

 pests fell all night," has " recovered greenness," and 



"Smells the dew and rain, 

 And buds again." 



For nature teaches no sweeter lesson than when, with floral sym- 

 bols, it repeats from year to year, to a sinful and mortal world, the 

 pictured hope of man's moral and material rebuilding. And the 

 Sanguinaria, with its blood-red root under ground, and its pearly 

 purity up in the April air, may rightly speak a word of hope to 

 those who in obscurity and darkness have all their lives distilled 

 only bitter tears, like drops of blood, from the griefs and defile- 

 ments of their lot. For with it what a beautiful white soul has 

 blossomed from a root-life so ensanguined and bitter ! How 

 greatly is it like those souls about the Throne " which have come 

 out of. great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made 

 them white in the blood of the Lamb." 



The poet's quaint fancy of flowers, "keeping house" all the win- 

 ter long, underground, finds plenty of illustrations in the real life 

 of many plants, notably in this one. The housekeeping, however, 

 does not use up in the winter what has been garnered in the sum- 

 mer. It only just preserves it for the early needs of the plant at 

 the beginning of the next season, before it shall have time to draw 

 anew from nature's great supplies. Through the long summer its 

 broad, roundish leaves are opened and lifted up to the sun and rain, 

 and with patient industry gather out of the air and dew stores 

 of invisible food. These, mingling with the nutritious elements 

 which its fine rootlets have sucked from the moistened soil, have 

 been slowly elaborated and laid away in the red root-stalk, lying 



