138 A Walk from 



mind and taste upon it? Its white and thin-sided 

 cup is brim full and running over with flowery exu- 

 berance of leaf and tint infinitely variegated. Here 

 it is as solid, as globe-faced, and nearly as large as 

 the dahlia. Place it side by side with the old, single- 

 leafed hollyhock, in a New England farmer's garden, 

 and his wife would not be able to trace any family 

 relationship between them, even through the spectacles 

 with which she reads the Bible. But the dahlia itself 

 what was that in its first estate, in the country in 

 which it was first found in its aboriginal structure and 

 complexion ? As plain and unpretending as the holly- 

 hock ; as thinly dressed as the short-kirtled daisy in a 

 Connecticut meadow. It is wonderful, and passing 

 wonder, how teachable and quick of perception and 

 prehension is Nature in the studio of Art. She, the 

 oldest of painters, that hung the earth, sea, and sky of 

 the Antediluvian world with landscapes, waterscapes, 

 and cloudscapes manifold and beautiful, when as yet 

 the human hand had never lifted a pencil to imitate 

 her skill; she, with the colors wherewith she dyed 

 the fleecy clouds that spread their purple drapery over 

 the first sunset, and in which she dipped the first rain- 

 bow hung in heaven, and the first rose that breathed 

 and blushed on earth ; she that has embellished every 

 day, since the Sun first opened its eye upon the world, 



