INTRODUCTION. 3 



sight with an agreeable senisation. Later in life, flowers 

 would fail to yield us any pleasure, did we not associate 

 them with certain agi-eeable fancies; with the remem- 

 brance perhaps of the pleasures they afforded us in 

 childhood, and of their connection with many simple 

 and interesting adventures; with the offices of friend- 

 ship and love, and their association with numerous 

 poetic and romantic images. But in some minds 

 flowers become so intimately allied with those interest- 

 ing sentiments, that they are beheld with still more de- 

 light than they afforded in childhood. It is for this rea- 

 son that if one spent his early years in the country, the 

 wild flowers are so much more pleasing, to a cultivated 

 and poetic mind, than the fair«st exotics, with the excep- 

 tion of those which have always been naturalized in our 

 gardens. 



He who lays out a garden with a gorgeous profusion 

 of flowers, so disposed as to make a dazzling kalei- 

 oscopic picture, and causing the grounds to resemble a 

 brilliant Turkey carpet, forgets that by this arrangement 

 he destroys all their power to contribute to the pleasures 

 of sentiment. The flowers are then degraded to act 

 the part of the mere threads which are used to form the 

 beautiful designs in tapestry. They lose thereby all 

 their individuality and all their poetry. They are ren- 

 dered by their assemblage, productive only of an agree- 

 able physical sensation : for this reason, minds of an 

 inferior order derive the most pleasure from these inane 

 exhibitions. Those gardens in which the flowers are 

 few and not artificially arranged, are the most pleasing 

 to a man of rational sensibility. As soon as they begin 

 to dazzle the eyes, they cease to interest the mind or to 

 affect the imagination. 



Man may derive the same pleasure from a garden 



