66 POETICAL LANGUAGE OP FLOWERS. 
getlier, they beguiled the listless cheerlessness of the 
way. Wherever they went, old age coveted no other 
companionship, nor did they leave a gray head to sink 
down in sorrow to the grave. They gave to poverty 
content, and to affliction resignation, and into the sad 
heart of pity they breathed hope. 
It was then that mankind began to find deep matter 
,> for meditation in the flowers — that they no longer 
looked upon the blossoms as the mere harbingers of 
the seasons and beautiful ornaments of the fields, but 
discovered that they were lettered over with the lan¬ 
guage of love, — that beauty bloomed where no human 
eye perceived it, in sequestered nooks and untrodden 
wilds, and Nature needed not the presence of man, to 
either look upon or praise her works. They believed 
that hidden spirits dwelt among the flowers of the 
woods, and that not a Bell waved in the solitudes of 
the pathless dell, but what had its own fair minister : 
“ That there are more things in heaven and earth 
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” 
That the airy tongues which syllable men’s names,” 
sounding on lonely moors and amid the silence of 
solemn forests, are invisible spirits, which linger about 
