I 
PREFACE 
EVER, perhaps, was there a time when Flowers 
were more loved and prized than at the present 
day. “ They seem intended,” as Ruskin has 
beautifully said, “for the solace of “ordinary 
“ humanity.” 
There are few who have not felt something from time to time 
of the feeling towards them to which Keble gave expression— 
“ Ye dwell beside our paths and homes, 
Our paths of sin, our homes of sorrow, 
And guilty man, where’er he roams, 
Your innocent mirth may borrow. 
The birds of air before us fleet, 
They cannot brook our shame to meet— 
But we may taste your solace sweet, 
And come again to-morrow.” 
And thus, to the devout and thoughtful mind the flowers, which 
have a message for all, speak a language of deeper and more 
spiritual import: they speak of God, His beauty and His love 
and the perfection of His works. 
Fair and beautiful indeed they are in themselves, but they 
are more than this to those who have eyes to see. “ I am the 
“ Rose of Sharon,” says the heavenly Bridegroom in the 
Canticles, “and the Lily of the Valley.” All the beauty of 
Nature is but a faint reflection of the ineffable beauty of Him 
who is “ the fairest among ten thousand and altogether lovely ; ” 
and, hence, the flowers that deck our meadows and our hedge 
rows, and make even the solitary wilderness to blossom as the 
rose, become a ‘ ‘ wayside sacrament ” to the pure in heart. 
