86 Thoughts from my Garden Seat. 



a few fresh hours, and then closes forever, and instead of a half- withered, 

 slowly-decaying flower, lo I to-morrow, we have all new ones, sprung as 

 by one magic touch from the womb of night. Ages ago, the Hebrew 

 poet said of the fairest and only One, the source and essence of all beauty, 

 His mercies are new every morning. 



These morning-glories, in their unvalued commonness, and yet their 

 strance, ethereal beauty, are a living emblem of that daily love which 

 God shows us daily, when we wake from the seeming death of sleep to a 

 new lease of life — a new present of all its adornments and comforts. 



Our garden is a perfect jungle of petunias — that flower so encoura- 

 ging to the souls of immature gardeners, so hopeful, so hardy, so full of 

 vanity, so persistent in bloom that no exuberance can possibly exhaust it. 

 We have taken from the ground a petunia that has been flaunting its 

 bloseoms all summer, cut it down for our winter window-garden, and seen 

 it bloom there with new vigor all winter ; and when spring came, go back 

 into the ground and flower on all summer, without one pause suggestive 

 of weariness. Ah ! how few among our living friends are there that cor- 

 respond to petunias. 



Verbenas also are an encouraging growth, requiring only sunshine 

 enough for untiring bloom. People with shaded borders should eschew 

 them, for thej will not blossom without a plenary fullness of sunlight. 

 Too much sun and heat they scarce can have, and they lift their heads to 

 it with an exultant glow ; they are like rich, poetic, artistic natures, which 

 revel in congenial warmth and culture, but become wilted, bloomless and 

 stinted, in cold, shaded, ungenial situations. Many persons can no more 

 be judged of, in such situations, than can the verbenas which some of our 

 neighbors are fond of planting in shady borders under the drip of over- 

 arching trees. " I see no beauty about the thing," they say ; " it's a 

 miserable, yellow, lank-growing vine, without form or comeliness.'' Yet, 

 friend, give it sunshine, and you will .see what it can do. Some of the 

 most gorgeous and splendid natures may have, all their lives in this world, 

 passed for miserable. failures — simply becau.se the sunshine of congeniality 

 and opportunity never awakened what was in them to bloom ; and there 

 may in the future life be glorious blossoms on plants which seemed poor 

 and stunted here. 



But, oh, these weeds I What I only a week since garden beds and al- 

 leys were faithfully cleaned, and now behold I 



Yet one word about these weeds. A friend said to us the other day, 

 Does it not seem a piece of impertinence to seize on a piece of ground 



