316 The Young Lady's Book. 



latter are dead, but flowers live. We can sow their seeds, and 

 watch them breaking through the earth, and rear them into beauty 

 and perfection. We have sympathies in their favor: they languish 

 beneath intense heat, and are chilled by the cold easterly blast; 

 they flourish for a time, and then fade away hke ourselves: but 

 the gem dies not: its duration, for ought we know, may reach to 

 the extent of time. Some may admire it for its beauty, and oth- 

 ers doat upon or covet it for its value ; but it has never that pure 

 hold on our affection, which the flower, we nourish possesses. 

 Besides, there are thousands of delightful associations connected 

 with flowers and shrubs. The imagination of the painter, or the 

 poet, never conceived a more exquisite picture of beauty than the 

 dove of the ark gliding towards Ararat with the olive-branch, over 

 the still, solitary, measureless surface of the waters, gazing down 

 upon its own shadow, and listening to the music made by its own 

 wings. Lectures on history, manners, or even mythology, might 

 be given with no text but a leaf or a flower. With a white and 

 red rose before him, the historian might comment upon the old 

 Enghshwars between the houses of York and Lancaster; a boquet 

 of Eastern flowers would recall to the traveller's memory some 

 dark-eyed maiden of Persia, whom he had seen committing to the 

 charge of a pigeon, — swiftest of messengers, — a billet composed 

 of buds, — the accepted symbols, in her father-land, of hope, joy, 

 grief, reproach, or affection ; and the humble daisy of the mead 

 might give a hint to those learned in antique lore, to depict Pros- 

 erpine gathering flowers in the vales of Sicily, unconscious of the 

 approach of gloomy Dis : a good homily, too, might be written 

 upon a violet. ' 



' What you have said is very true, Lady Mary,' replied her 

 cousin ; ' but the mineral has also its associations : it possesses 

 a greater individuahty of interest, in this respect, than the flower. 

 You may show me a rose of the same species as those worn by 

 the princely Plantagenets, but it is not the same rose. The flower 

 perishes before the hand that gathers it is cold ; but the mineral's 

 duration affords scope for the imagination to roam as far as the 

 border-land of the probable and the possible. The wise may 

 smile at me for indulging the feeling, or making the confession 

 but I have often detected something akin to awe creeping over 

 me when gazing upon a gem : — it may have sparkled on the arm 

 of Cleopatra, as she sailed down the Cydnus ; or enriched the 

 crown of Semiramis, or the girdle of a Ptolemy ; or been worn 

 by the Theban mummy that was embalmed three thousand years 

 ago, and after that immensity of time, is brought to revisit the 

 glimpses of the moon, to be gazed and wondered at by those who 



