THE LOVE OF FLOWERS. 
307 
It was the awakening of the sentiment of love for 
flowers which brought back the prisoner of Fenestrella to 
the acknowledgment of a God; maddened by solitude, and 
exhausted by profligacy and the unceasing anxieties of a 
troubled soul, he denied his Maker, and cast himself into 
the black and desolate regions of infidelity; but while 
expiating, within the walls of a prison, for the rash im¬ 
petuosities of his youth, a little flower springs up between 
the chinks of the stones, and becomes to him a messenger 
of love and mercy, while his soul is on the very threshold of 
moral despair. It is pleasant to read how the botanist, 
Douglas, was cheered in his wanderings in America, 
when he met with a blooming primrose high up on the 
bald summit of a rocky mountain, where the clouds 
rolled in darkness, and mingled their dense whiteness 
with the giant masses of eternal snow. The explorers of 
the rocky mountains of the West were, in a like manner, 
comforted, and reminded of the flowery valleys and fertile 
plains which they had left far behind them, when, amid 
the desolate and barren hills, where not even a blade of 
grass was to be seen for miles, they saw a little bee, 
humming along as if in quest of flowers, and in a 
region many thousand feet above the level of the sea. 
Schimmelpenninck^ tells an anecdote of the philoso¬ 
pher of Geneva, which illustrates, in a pleasing manner, 
the close bond of union between mind of the highest 
order and the simple beauties of nature. During the 
earliest and happiest years of the life of E^osseau, he was 
one day walking with a beloved friend. It was summer 
* (i Theory of Beauty and Deformity.” 
x 2 
