12 FLOWERS OF THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



NATURE also is an artist and an author. She paints the 

 flowers before we copy them, and writes their simple story for 

 us to tell again. We have put upon the first page of our book 

 a charming flower, which she also displays upon the opening 

 leaves of the great floral book of the year. The story of its 

 modest life is not a long or a startling one, but perhaps it has 

 a cheery word of hope, which weary, wintry hearts, longing for 

 spring, may be glad to hear. 



In the very early April days, which in our New England clime 

 are not over likely to be sunny days, before the leaves come out 

 at all upon the trees, when the downy catkins are first showing 

 the revival of life in the willows by the brook-side, before any 

 green thing yet gladdens the eye in field or forest, and the brown 

 dead grass and the brown dead leaves cover all the ground, then 

 it is that in the edges of the moist, rich woods the Sanguinaria 

 puts up its slender stem, crowned with its circlet of petals daz- 

 zling white. It is a most beautiful flower, and, to my thoughts, 

 a beautiful emblem of nature's Easter, its pure whiteness having 

 something more than the earthly in its unstained loveliness. It 

 seems almost to have lived its earthly course, and passing through 

 the disrobing room of Death, which 



" has left on her 

 Only the beautiful." 



comes now as the promise, radiant and heavenly, of that touch of 

 the Infinite Life by which all the dead are quickened. 



It is not easy to say why we see in all these, beautiful forms 

 of nature these hidden meanings, and delight to trace in them 

 a likeness to our deeper thoughts and experiences. Are these 



