IX 
loveliness; but trebly blessing us in the bimiliar and 
beautiful power they possess of awakening in our hearts 
feelings of wonder, admiration, gratitude, and devotion; 
teaching us to look from Earth to Him who called it 
into existence, and to feel how worthy of our unceas¬ 
ing thankful adoration must be that Being, the meanest 
of whose creations is so wonderfully, so beautifully 
adapted to its appointed position in the vast whole. 
Flowers seem to form the easiest and pleasantest path¬ 
way to further love and knowledge of Nature’s glories. 
They are indigenous to every soil, and familiar to every 
eye; a universal language of love, beauty, poetry, and 
wisdom, if we read them aright. 
But, in thus prefacing my present volume I am, 
perhaps, wrong, as in the following pages I have 
sought only to express the beauty, poetry, and Ro¬ 
mance of Nature which appear in the forms and 
characters of Flowers. I have called in the aid of 
fiction to vary the strain for the ears of those unac¬ 
customed to songs of simple truth; and I have, in 
one or two instances, ventured a half-fable, the better 
to illustrate my meaning. 
Need I say that the Wild Flowers of my own fair 
Land are dearer to me than any others? If it be 
requisite to tell this to my readers at the commencement 
of these sketches, they will certainly need no repeti¬ 
tion of the intelligence; for, on glancing over my illus- 
b 
