XXI. BEAUTY FOR ASHES. 



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secular winter, has sprung up the wonderful beauty of 

 the pine-forests, which welcome the winter's snow and 

 the summer's sunshine, and maintain their youthful 

 greenness unimpaired from century to century through 

 a thousand storms. 



Is there not beauty for ashes, when the starchy 

 matter which gives the grey colour to the lichen is 

 changed by the winter rains into chlorophyl, and the 

 dry, lifeless, parchment-like substance becomes a bright 

 green pliable rosette, as remarkable for the elegance of 

 its form as for the vividness of its colour ? Does not 

 the corn of wheat, when God, as Ezekiel strikingly says, 

 " calls " for it and increases it, develop out of the grey 

 ashes that wrap round and preserve the embers of its 

 life, the long spears of bright verdure which pierce 

 through the dark wintry soil up to the sunshine and the 

 blue air of heaven ? Does not the ivy which, at the 

 close of autumn, in spite of its eternal monotony of hue 

 and freshness, sympathizes with the fading leaves around, 

 and assumes, in harmony with them, colours varying 

 from dark brown to brilliant scarlet and purple, produce 

 out of the ashes of its summer growth which have caused 

 these russet tints in the leaves, a new and even more 

 striking beauty in the following spring ? What are the 

 materials that enter more or less into the composition 

 of those parts of a plant in which the life is arrested for 

 a time before it starts anew with increased vigour the 

 root, the stem, the fruit, the seed ; what are starch, 

 gum, sugar, and most of the products of vegetation, so 

 useful in human economy, and so absolutely necessary 



