FLOWERS AS EMBLEMS. 



The custom of emblemizing flowers, which has pre- 

 vailed among all nations, springs from a native passion 

 of the human mind. To the fancy they are person^, 

 objects of friendship and love, having the semblance of 

 our virtues and affections. If we speak of them with 

 passionate regard, it is because we thus personify them 

 and clothe them with human and even divine qualities. 

 The virtues we admire in the characters of our friends Ave 

 are delighted to behold symbolized in flowers. Hence 

 those representing modesty, humility, delicacy, and purity 

 are our favorites, while we seldom long admire the gaudy 

 and showy flowers. We prize them in proportion as 

 they are suggestive of some pleasing moral sentiment. 

 Hence a white flower, which is without beauty of color, 

 often gains more of our admiration than another similar 

 one of beautiful tints. 



Wordsworth habitually views the minor works of na- 

 ture through this moral coloring, and loves to speak the 

 praises of the common and simple garden flowers. Like 

 a true poet, he sees in them more to awaken pleasant and 

 salutary thoughts than in those which are prized at floral 

 exhibitions. He has woven many delightful emblematic 

 images with flowers, and through them has conveyed im- 

 portant sentiments of a moral and religious kind. He 

 considers the daisy, which is scattered widely in England 

 over every field and near every footpath, and which is 

 also cultivated at cottage-windows in many different 

 countries, as a "pilgrim of nature," whose home is every- 



