FLORAL ANTIQUITIES OE THE EAST. 195 
struggling, there embracing; here pining under false 
faith, and despotism, and savagery; there giving the soul 
room to grow in an atmosphere of love, kneeling together 
before shrines of light. There are burning sands and 
rocky heights, and giant caverns where darkness crouches, 
and blood trickles unseen. Temples, altars, and sicken¬ 
ing cities where Death holds carnival; and over all are 
wreaths of flowers, twining, creeping—in thick bowers 
of fragrance, in lovely forms of green leafiness, in mossy 
slopes, and shady coolness and delightful umbrage. 
“Elowers foreshadow the future,” but they guide us 
through the past; lead the way into its dark recesses, 
and point us to the birthplaces of the holiest influences. 
Strangely, but truly, do flowers mingle in all the events 
and passions of the world, refreshing the heart of man 
with their greenness, and binding life and love together 
by plaited wreaths of beauty. Strangely, but truly, do 
these plaited wreaths unwind from columns which have 
crumbled in their embrace; strangely do they fall off, 
sere and withered, from the stony faces of the temples 
and idols of the past; and more strangely still, a fresh 
group spring up there to hide the ghastly ruins from the 
sun, and to throw over the white bones and powdered 
granite a warm hue of life, making the two ends of the 
world meet as they do often on the cheek of beauty— 
life, fresh and beautiful, above; Death, with his stony eye, 
lurking underneath. 
And yet those fallen altars, those crumbling monu¬ 
ments, those lands dyed with the blood of the brave, 
and sprinkled with fragments as with flakes of snow, 
still hide under their coverings of flowers the records of 
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