HENRY WARD BEECHER ON THE LOVE FOR FLOWERS. 
Happy is the man that loves flowers! Happy, 
€ven if it be a love adulterated with vanity and 
strife. For human passions nestle in flower- 
lovers too. Some employ their zeal chiefly in 
horticultural competitions, or in the ambition 
of floral shows. Others love flowers as curios- 
ities, and search for novelties, for ‘‘sports,” and 
vegetable monstrosities. We have been led 
through costly collections by men whose chiet 
pleasure seemed to be in the effect which their 
treasures produced on others, not on them- 
selves. Their love of flowers was only the love 
of being praised for having them. But there is 
a choice in vanities and ostentations. A con- 
test of roses is better than of horses. We had 
rather be vain of the best tulip, dahlia or 
rananculus, than of the best shot. Of all fools, 
a floral fool deserves the eminence. 
But these aside, blessed be the man that 
really loves flowers !—loves them for their own 
sake, for their beauty, their associations, the 
joys they have given and always will give; so 
that he would sit down among them as friends 
and companions, if there was not another crea- 
ture on earth to admire or praise them. But 
such men need no blessing of mine. They are 
blessed of God! Did He not make the world 
forsuch men? Are they not clearly the own- 
ers of the world, and the richest of all men ? 
It is the end of art to inoculate men with the 
love of Nature. But those who have a passion 
for Nature in the natural way need no pictures 
nor galleries. Spring is their designer, and the 
whole year their artist. 
He who only does not appreciate floral 
beauty is to be pitied like any other man who 
is born imperfect. It is a misfortune not unlike 
blindness. But men who contemptuously re- 
ject flowers as effeminate and unworthy of 
manhood, reveal a certain coarseness. Were 
flowers fit to eat or drink, were they stimulative 
of passions, or could they be gambled with like 
stocks and public consciences, they would take 
them up just where finer minds would drop 
them, who love them as the revelations of 
God's sense of beauty, as addressed to the taste, 
and to something finer and deeper than taste, 
to that power within us which spiritualizes 
matter, and communes with God through His 
work, and not for their paltry market value. 
Many persons lose all enjoyment of many 
flowers by indulging false associations. There 
be some who think that no weed can be of in- 
terest as a flower. But all flowers are weeds 
where they grow wildly and abundantly; and 
somewhere our rarest flowers are somebody’s 
commonest. Flowers growing in noisome 
places, in desolate corners, upon rubbish or 
rank des_lation, become disagreeable by asso- 
ciation. Roadside flowers, iaeradicable, and 
hardly beyond all discouragement, lose them- 
selves from our sense of delicacy and protec- 
tion. And, generally, there is a disposition to 
undervalue common flowers. There are few 
that will trouble themselves to examine min- 
utely a blossom that they have seen and neg- 
lected from their childhood; and yet if they 
would but question such flowers, and commune 
with them, they would often be surprised to 
find extreme beauty where it had long been 
overlooked. 
If a plant be uncouth, it has no attractions to 
us simply because it has been brought from the 
ends of the earth and is a ‘‘ great rarity;” if it 
has beauty, it is none the less, but a great deal 
more attractive to us, because it is common. 
A very common flower adds generosity to 
beauty. It gives joy to the poor, the rude, and 
to the multitudes who could have no flowers 
were Nature to charge a price for her blossoms. 
Is a cloud less beautiful, or a sea, or a moun- 
tain, because often seen, or seen by millions ? 
At any rate, while we lose no fondness for 
eminent and accomplished flowers, we are 
conscious of a growing respect for the floral 
democratic throng. There is for instance, the 
mullein, of but little beauty in each floweret, 
but a brave plant, growing cheerfully and 
heartily out of abandoned soils, ruffling its 
root about, with broad-palmed, generous, velvet 
leaves, and erecting therefrom a _ towering 
spire that always inclines us to stop for a 
kindly look. This fine plant is left, by most 
people, like a decayed old gentleman, to a 
