66 VOICE OF FLOWERS. 



COMPARED TO FLOWERS. 



Go seek the choicest sweets that Nature fair 

 Hath kindly trusted to the culturer s care, 

 Unfolding buds, with vernal dew-drops pure, 

 Resplendent flowers, that summer suns ma 

 ture, 



*At the dissolution of a Literary Society, whose members (nine 

 of each sex) were united in friendship as well as in intellectual 

 pursuit, it was proposed that some emblematic poem should 

 preserve the recollection of their pleasant intercourse. Thus 

 the foregoing poem, which has been hitherto unpublished, was 

 called into existence ; and a beautifully painted bouquet was 

 also executed by another member, in which the eighteen per 

 sonified flowers were tastefully grouped. 



The arbitrary signification of the inmates of Flora s realm 

 not being as generally adopted at that period, as now, the se 

 lections in the foregoing lines were founded less upon those, 

 than upon some supposed resemblance between the flowers and 

 the character they typified. Now, at the expiration of a quar 

 ter of a century, during which the spoiler has not left our cir 

 cle unvisited, some of the passages acquire interest, as being 

 linked by tender associations to the memory of the departed 

 and beloved. 



