THE UTILITY OF FLOWERS. 15 
pleased ?? What pleasures more pure, more warming to 
the heart, more improving to the mind, more chastening to 
the affections, than those which come through the eye! 
Where are more luminously displayed the perfections of 
the Creator, than in the star spangled heavens above, and 
the flower spangled earth beneath? 
“Your voiceless lips, oh flowers, are living preachers, 
Each cup a pulpit, and each leaf a book, 
Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers 
From the loneliest nook.”"—Horace Smith. 
Nonsense,—sheer nonsense to tell us it is useless to 
cultivate flowers. They add to the charms of our homes, 
rendering them more attractive and beautiful, and they 
multiply and strengthen the domestic ties which bind us to 
them. We would not advocate the cultivation of flowers 
to the neglect of more necessary objects. Attending to 
the one, does not involve neglect of the other. Every 
man engaged in the culture of the earth, can find time to 
embellish his premises who has the will to do it, and we pity 
the family of the man who has not. ‘Rob the earth of 
its flowers, the wondrous mechanism of the Almighty, 
and we should lose the choicest mementos left us that 
it was once a paradise.” 
“Ye bright Mosaics ! that with storied beauty 
The floor of nature’s temple tesselate, 
What numerous emblems of instructive duty 
Your forms create.—Horace Smith. 
“We have no sympathy with those, who would dese- 
erate and pare down the loveliness of earth to the grade 
of mere utility—who can discover no beauty in the open- 
ing bud and blushing flower’, and whose exertions are 
limited on all occasions by a parsimonious idolatry and 
worse than idiotic privation of sensibility to the madden- 
ing love of Gold.” The love of flowers is a sentiment 
common alike to the great and little; to the old and young ; 
