ty 
18 BRECK’S NEW BOOK OF FLOWEBRS. 
the table, and meet the eye in every direction, on all festive 
occasions; but they are not there accompanied by what 
we here enjoy. Here alone—here and in Christian lands— 
WOMAN enchants and beautifies with her presence, the 
festive scene. Woman—our equal—shall I not say our 
moral superior. It is only here, that such a scene can 
gladden the human eye. I regard this exhibition as a 
striking proof of the point which education and intel- 
lectual refinement have reached in our country; that we 
have got beyond mere utility, and ceasing to inquire how 
far it is incompatible with beauty, have found that the 
beautiful is of itself useful. We have learned to admire 
art, to appreciate sculpture and painting, and to look upon 
fruits and flowers, as models of delicacy and beauty.” 
The Hon. Robert C. Winthrop remarked, that, “he had 
never cultivated flowers, not even the flowers of rhetoric; 
as to the sentimentalities of the subject, Mrs. Caudle had 
quite exhausted them in a single sentence of one of her 
last lectures, when she told her husband how ‘she was 
born for a garden! There is something about it that 
makes one feel so innocent! My heart always opens and 
shuts at roses.” Shakespeare had pronounced it to be 
‘ wasteful and ridiculous excess, to paint the lily, or throw 
a perfume upon the violet.’ And so it would be. The 
violets had been called, ‘sweet as the lids of Juno’s eyes 
or Cythercea’s breath ;’ and of the lilies it had been divinely 
said, that ‘Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
one of these.’ Both had already a grace beyond the reach 
of art. But to multiply varieties of fruit and flowers; to 
increase their abundance, and scatter them with a richer 
profusion along the way-sides of life; to improve their 
quality, coloring and fragrance, wherever it was pos- 
sible to do so; this, the great poet of nature, would 
have been the last person to call wasteful. Its utility 
would only be questioned by those who counted it useless 
