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ON THE LOVE OF FLOWERS. 



The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any alloy 

 or debasing object as a motive; the cottage has its pink, its rose, its polyanthus ; 

 the villa its geranium, its dahlia, and its clematis : we cherish them in youth, we 

 admire them in declining days ; but, perhaps, it is the early flowers of spring 

 that always bring with them the greatest degree of pleasure, and our affections 

 seem immediately to expand at the sight of the first opening blossom under the 

 sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be. In the long and 

 sombre months of winter our love of nature, like the buds of vegetation, seems 

 closed and torpid ; but, like them, it unfolds and reanimates with the opening 

 spring, and we welcome our longdost associates with a cordiality that no other 

 season can excite, as friends in a foreign clime. The violet of autumn is greeted 

 with none of the love with which we hail the violet of the spring ; it is unseason- 

 able, perhaps it brings with it rather a thought of melancholy than of joy ; we 

 view it with curiosity, not affection : and thus the late is not like the opening rose. 



It is not intrinsic beauty or splendour that so charms us, for the fair maids 

 of Spring cannot compete with the grander matrons of the advanced year ; they 

 would be unheeded, and perhaps lost, in the rosy bowers of summer and of 

 autumn ; no, it is our first meeting with a long-lost friend, the reviving glow of 

 a natural affection, that so warms us at this season : to maturity they give 

 pleasure, as a harbinger of the renewal of life, a signal of awakening nature, or of 

 a higher promise ; to youth they are expanding beings, opening years, hilarity 

 and joy ; and the child let loose from the house, riots in the flowery mead, and is 



" Monarch of all he surveys." 



There is not a prettier emblem of Spring than an infant sporting in the 

 sunny field, with its osier basket wreathed with butter-cups, orchises, and daisies. 

 With summer flowers we seem to live as with our neighbours, in harmony and 

 good-will ; but spring flowers are cherished as private friendships. 



The amusements and fancies of children, when connected with flowers, are 

 always pleasing, being generally the conceptions of innocent minds, unbiassed by 

 artifice or pretence ; and their love of them seems to spring from a genuine 

 feeling and admiration, a kind of sympathy with objects as fair as their own 

 untainted minds : and I think that it is early flowers which constitute their first 

 natural playthings ; though summer presents a greater number and variety, 

 they are not so fondly selected. We have our daisies strung and wreathed about 

 our dress ; our coronals of orchises and primroses ; our cowslip balls, &c. ; and 

 one application of flowers at this season I have noticed, which, though perhaps it 



