INTRODUCTION. 3 



sight with an agreeable sensation. Later in life, flowers 

 would fail to yield us any pleasure, did we not associate 

 them with certain agreeable fancies; with the remem 

 brance perhaps of the pleasures they afforded us in 

 childhood, and of their connection with many simple 

 and interesting adventures; with. the offices of friend 

 ship and love, and their association with numerous 

 poetic and romantic images. But in some minds 

 flowers become s intimately allied with those interest 

 ing sentiments, that they are beheld with still more de 

 light than they afforded in childhood. It is for this rea 

 son that if one spent his early years in the country, the 

 wild flowers are so much more pleasing, to a cultivated 

 and poetic mind, than the fairest exotics, with the excep 

 tion of those which have always been naturalized in our 

 gardens. 



He who lays out a garden with a gorgeous profusion 

 of flowers, so disposed as to make a dazzling kalei- 

 oscopic picture, and causing the grounds to resemble a 

 brilliant Turkey carpet, forgets that by this arrangement 

 he destroys all their power to contribute to the pleasures 

 of sentiment. The flowers are then degraded to act 

 the part of the mere threads which are used to form the 

 beautiful designs in tapestry. They lose thereby all 

 their individuality and all their poetry. They are ren 

 dered by their assemblage, productive only of an agree 

 able physical sensation : for this reason, minds of an 

 inferior order derive the most pleasure from these inane 

 exhibitions. Those gardens in which the flowers are 

 few and not artificially arranged, are the most pleasing 

 to a man of rational sensibility. As soon as they begin 

 to dazzle the eyes, they cease to interest the mind or to 

 affect the imagination. 



Man may derive the same pleasure from a garden 



