(XIV) 
“Ye living Flowers that skirt the eternal frost!”— 
down among the foot-hills besprent with flowery showers, on—over steppe and 
pampas and savanna, interspersed with heather-bells or fringed by hawthorn 
blows—through more genial realms with their more and more generous yields, 
till we reach the prodigies of luxuriant growth in the tropics. Deep down in 
ocean’s caverns, also—nestling or climbing, or straying over the floor of the sea— 
are these ubiquitous specimen’s of Nature’s vegetative power. 
Yet, without staying to feast our eyes on this multitude and diversity of 
even the better known Flowers and Plants; nor yet tarrying with herbaceous 
freaks —a term artfully employed, perhaps, to conceal man’s nescience of hidden 
law—one may, however, mention those many singular mosses of land and water, 
those minute and almost wholly obscured vegetous organisms, which thrive un¬ 
seen and spend their lives for God alone, and pause a brief moment, attempting 
to descry those further cryptogamous curiosities—including the Lichens and 
then, the Orchids, both with their thousands of species and varieties—but of 
which, let the poets gleefully sing: 
“Little Lichen, fondly clinging 
In the wildwood to the tree; 
Covering all unseemly places, 
Hiding all their tender graces, 
Ever dwelling in the shade, 
Never seeing sunny glade.” 
“Around the pillars of the palm-tree bower, 
The Orchids cling, in rose and purple spheres.” 
“In the marsh, pink Orchids’ faces, 
With their coy and dainty graces, 
Lure us to their hiding places— 
Laugh, O murmuring Spring!” 
III. 
If one be not over-much dazed at the multifarious exhibition spread before 
him, he should approach nearer—here and there—and examine the marvelous 
structures, the wondrous mechanism, the delicate tissues, the daintily tinged or 
fitly provided vesture, the mysterious germination, and the gradual outgrowing 
