14 BRECK’S NEW BOOK OF FLOWERS. 
not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” 
How surely would Solomon himself have agreed with this 
beautiful speech! that his wise heart loved the flowers, the 
lily especially, is evident from the numerous passages m 
his song. The object of his love in claiming a supreme 
dignity of beauty, exclaims: “I am the rose of Sharon, 
and the lily of the valley.” : 
The Emperor Dioclesian preferred his garden to a throne: 
“Methinks I see great Dioclesian walk 
In the Salonian garden’s noble shade 
Which by his own imperial hands was made; 
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk 
With the ambassadors, who came in vain 
T’entice him to a throne again. 
‘If I, my friends,’ said he, ‘ should to you show 
All the delights which in these gardens grow, 
Tis likelier far that you with me should stay, 
Than ’tis that you should carry me away ; 
And trust me not, my friends, if, every day, 
I walk not here with more delight, 
Than ever, after the most happy fight, 
In triumph to the capital I rode, 
To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a’god.’” 
Cowley’s Garden. 
There is a class of men who whould pare down every 
thing to the mere grade of utility who think it the height 
of wisdom to ask, when one manifests an enthusaism in the 
culture of flowers, “of what use are they?” With such 
we have no sympathy. We will not say with the late 
Henry Colman, in case such an interrogatory being put to 
us that “our first impulse is to look under his hat, and seé 
the length of his ears,” but we are always inclined in such 
cases to thank God that our tastes do not correspond with 
their’s. “‘ Better,” (say these ultra utilitarians,) “devote 
our time to the culture of things useful and needed to 
sustain life, than to employ it on things, which, like flow- 
ers, are intended only to look at and please the eye.” 
‘But why,’ would we ask, ‘why should not the eye be 
