18 breck's new book of flowers. 



the table, and meet the eye in every direction, on all festive 

 occasions ; but they are not there accompanied by what 

 we here enjoy. Here alone — here and in Christian lands — 

 ■WOMAN enchants and beautifies with her presence, the 

 festive scene. Woman — our equal — shall I not say our 

 moral superior. It is only here, that such a scene can 

 gladden the human eye. I regard this exhibition as a 

 striking proof of the point which education and intel- 

 lectual refinement have reached in our country; that we 

 have got beyond mere utihty, and ceasing to inquire how 

 far it is incompatible with beauty, have found that the 

 beautiful is of itself useful. We have learned to admire 

 art, to appreciate sculpture and painting, and to look upon 

 fruits and flowers, as models of delicacy and l)eauty." 

 The Hon. Robert C. Winthrop remarked, that, *'he had 

 never cultivated flowers, not even the flowers of rhetoric ; 

 as to the sentimentahties of the subject, Mrs. Caudle had 

 quite exhausted them in a single sentence of one of her 

 last lectures, when she told her husband how ' she was 

 born for a garden ! There is something about it that 

 makes one fet^ so innocent ! My heart always opens and 

 shuts at roses.' Shakespeare had pronounced it to be 

 ' wasteful and ridiculous excess, to paint the lily, or throw 

 a perfume upon the violet.' And so it would be. The 

 violets had been called, ' sweet as the lids of Juno's eyes 

 or Cytheroea's breath ;' and of the lilies it had been divinely 

 said, that ' Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 

 one of these.' Both had already a grace beyond the reach 

 of art. But to multiply varieties of fruit and flowers ; to 

 increase their abundance, and scatter them with a richer 

 profusion along the way-sides of life ; to improve their 

 quality, coloring and fragrance, wherever it was pos- 

 sible to do so ; this, the great poet of nature, would 

 have been the last person to call wasteful. Its utility 

 would only be questioned by those who counted it useless 



