2o8 the associations of flowers 
“ Sweet is the breath of morn, its rising sweet, 
With charm of earliest birds.’' 
The country is so calmly beautiful in the morning that 
it seems rather to belong to the world of dreams which we 
have just quitted; to be some Paradise, which suffering 
and care cannot enter, than to form a portion of a busy 
and anxious world, in which even the very flowers must 
share in decay and death. 
How glad are they who love nature too well to sleep 
when she is putting on her loveliest dress, to wander away 
into the woods and meadows 1 The mower with his scythe 
is laying low the flowers of the field, and, like his great 
prototype, Death, will spare neither the proud nor the 
lowly; and now will fall many 
“ A coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers. 
While that same dew' which sometimes on the buds 
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls. 
Stands now within the pretty flow ’rets’ eyes. 
Like tears which do their own disgrace bewail.” 
But the flowers of the hedges and copses will remain to 
pour out their fragrance long after the hay is carried from 
the field. The sweet woodruff is secure ; for it is a lover 
of the quiet wood, and can only be found where tree or 
bush will lend a friendly shelter from the rough winds or 
storms, which might fall too heavy upon its gentle head. 
A very pretty little plant is the sweet woodruff, with its 
thick clusters of purely white jasmine-shaped flowers, and 
its numerous coronals of bright-green leaves, placed one 
above another around its stem. One might almost fancy 
that a great divine was thinking of this very flower when 
he said that the soul of a good man was like “ such a little 
flower as we see in the spring of the year, low and humble 
on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant 
beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm 
rapture ; diffusing a sweet fragrance ; standing peacefully 
and lovingly in the midst of other flowers round about it, 
all in like manner opening their bosoms to receive the 
light of the sun.” This little flower of the wild is indeed 
well adapted to suggest to the mind an image of purity 
and humility. 
