50 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



For the right, and learns to deaden 



Love of self, before his journey closes, 

 He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 

 Into glossy purples which outredden 



All voluptuous garden roses." 



He seems to have embodied the universe in six lines. 



"Flower hi the crannied wall, 

 I pluck you out of the crannies, 

 Hold you here, root and all, in my hand. 

 Little flower — but if I could understand 

 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

 I should know what God and man is." 



Shelley and Moore, Tennyson, Browning and Mar}' Howitt have 

 written of the "light-encbantcd sunflower." Here are three lines 

 that can illumine a cloudy day : 



'"Miles and miles of golden green. 

 Where the sunflowers blow 

 In a solid glow." 



The best American writers have said beautiful things of the flow- 

 ers that grew in their mother's garden, or the wild- wood blossoms of 

 their boyhood. Holmes loves morning-glories and damask roses, 

 and Emerson the rhodora. Bryant wrote of the yellow violet in 

 spring, and the fringed gentian in autumn. Whittier draws from 

 field and forest beautiful lessons of faith and trust. Thoreau takes 

 us into the heart of the woods. Mrs. Thaxter has given us a pic- 

 ture of the golden- rod with an ocean background. 



"Graceful, tossing plume of glowing gold 



Waving lonely on the rocky ledge; 

 Leaning seaward, lovely to behold. 



Clinging to the high cliffs' ragged edge." 



There is a sweetness in Longfellow's allusions that is almost better 

 than the flowers themselves. Hawthorne added beauty to whatever 

 he touched. We all remember the scarlet flowering-beans in the old 

 Pyncheon garden, and Phoebe's crimson rose that, for a moment, 

 brought back his youth to the sad ruin of a man. Nothing can be 

 more charming than the description of his garden at the Old Manse, 

 .and the cardinal flowers and pond lilies along the Concord river. 



In our churches we still preserve a relic of the ancient floral offer- 

 ings. Religion has been associated with flowers in sacrifices, in 

 decorations, in emblems, and in the words of divine teachers. The 



