68 LOVE OF FLOWERS. 



it is unseasonable, perhaps it brings with it rather 

 a thought of melancholy than of joy ; we view it 

 with curiosity, not affection : and thus the late is 

 not like the early rose. It is not intrinsic beauty 

 or splendour that so charms us, for the fair maids 

 of spring cannot compete with the grander matrons 

 of the advanced year ; they would be unheeded, 

 perhaps lost, in the rosy bowers of summer and 

 of autumn ; no, it is our first meeting with a long- 

 lost friend, the reviving glow of a natural affec- 

 tion, that so warms us at this season : to maturity 

 they give pleasure, as a harbinger of the renewal 

 of life, a signal of awakening nature, or of a 

 higher promise; to youth, they are expanding 

 being, opening years, hilarity, and joy ; and the 

 child, let loose from the house, riots in the flowery 

 mead, and is 



Monarch of all he surveys, 



There is not a prettier emblem of spring than 

 an infant sporting in the sunny field, with its osier 

 basket wreathed with butter-cups, orchises, and 

 daisies. With summer flowers we seem to live as 

 with our neighbours, in harmony and good-will; 

 but spring flowers are cherished as private friend- 

 ships. 



The amusements and fancies of children, when 

 connected with flowers, are always pleasing, being 

 generally the conceptions of innocent minds un- 

 biassed by artifice or pretence ; and their love of 

 them seems to spring from a genuine feeling and 

 admiration, a kind of sympathy with objects as 



