106 FOBBST TREES OF CALIFORNIA. 



white, of broadly open bell form, four or five lip lobes, only 

 lightly scolloped, and sufficiently out-turned for character — 

 save the pretty pouting — more modestly nodding than even 

 the fair-famed violet, on slender thread-like flower stems, 

 the prettiest, broadest, and relatively largest flowered of our 

 loftiest highland heathers — size of large peas. This is by 

 far the most modest, neatest little belle that ever bloomed ; 

 more divinely chaste than classic goddess ever dreamed, the 

 very perfection of all the tiny floral beauties that ever blos- 

 somed outside Eden ; to other eyes, as to our own, the highest 

 conceivable type of artistic taste, nay, angelic, yet supreme 

 in simplicity, and such of its kind as no natural human eye 

 ever saw its eke. And why should it not be so? Preemi- 

 nently placed on the most high mounts, serenely above all 

 else, at twelve thousand feet or more aloof from the sensual 

 depths of those dark seas below; and now, as then, and for- 

 evermore, commemorative of the chaste wife and all pure 

 virgin souls, ever serenest in pensive beauty, most elevated 

 in purest purpose, meekly enthroned the fairest symbolic 

 queen of all the virtues, emblems of exalted honor, types of 

 the purity of truth, born of the highest mountains, cherished 

 in realms of purest ethers, garlands of the prettiest alpine 

 gardens; naught of earth can awake such pure delight as 

 the fairy Queenly Cassiope Heathling of the snowy Sierras 

 of California. 



In all our walks with orderly nature, even in the presence 

 of the conspicuous and more obtrusive beauties that gleam 

 and glow far and near, lofty or lowly, the charm is always 

 heightened by the humble that fill up the measure of natural 

 delight, each playing its own harmonious part well in the 

 grand orchestra that swells sublimely heavenward in the 

 loftj 7 notes of the great Sequoian Cedar and their alpine con- 

 geners, or more tacitly thrills magnetically along the lesser 

 hills of our humanity adown the fruitful vales to the utmost 

 extremes that make glad the very last and least fibre of 

 earthly existence. These reactive types of objective nature 

 everywhere, higher and highest things of life, are the nat- 

 ural parables of Him who never yet spake to man without 

 a parable. 



California Rose Bay {Rhododendron Calif ornicum). — Of 

 all the handsomest, most showy, arborescent shrubs that 

 adorn the wild woods of coasts, mountain forests, or the hab- 

 itations of men with blooms of superior splendor, magnifi- 

 cently mantled in evergreen foliage of great elegance and 

 dignity, few, perhaps none, excel the Rhododendrons. Not- 

 withstanding ours is a noble species, from eight to twenty- 

 five feet, or even more, one fourth to a foot in diameter, we 

 believe it has not been introduced hitherto to any extent. 



