24 LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS. 
tean plant, and kissed it as fondly as he would 
have kissed the lips of a beloved mistress. It 
would be impossible to describe the many de¬ 
lightful ideas and recollections for which, during 
my solitary journeys, I have been indebted to 
the chronicle of Flora.” 
A flower-garden may be compared to a pano- - 
rama of hieroglyphics, displaying not the mise¬ 
rable worldly wisdom of mortals, inscribed in 
dead characters, but the maxims of immortal 
philosophy, exhibited in living forms with all 
their peculiar varieties. Fancy traces a sym¬ 
bolic resemblance between man and the forms 
and motions of all the natural objects in the . 
creation; and, to borrow Chateaubriand’s bold 
metaphor, the whole universe may be considered 
as the imagination of the Deity rendered visible; 
yet certainly this similarity is most particularly 
striking in the vegetable world. The most 
superficial observer cannot fail to perceive that 
plants present faithful emblems of the various 
stages of human life, and the most remarkable 
peculiarities in our physical formation, and in 
our moral relations to each other. 
In those southern regions, where every living 
