6 PREFACE. 
their Creator : and ours shall be the office, in this 
little volume, to translate their pleasing language, 
and to show that no spoken word can approach 
to the delicacy of sentiment to be inferred from a 
flower seasonably offered; that the softest impres¬ 
sions may be thus conveyed without offence, and 
even profound grief alleviated, at a moment when 
the most tuneful voice would grate harshly on the 
ear, and when the stricken soul can be soothed only 
by unbroken silence. 
In treating of so gay a subject, we wilt not make 
a parade of our learning, to tell our fair readers 
what fine things Pliny has said upon it; or, in the 
spirit of prosing, write a crabbed treatise upon the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics. We will even spare them 
a dissertation upon the Floral Alphabet of the effe¬ 
minate Chinese; they had, and have, their flowers 
and their feelings, their emblems and their ecstacies. 
Let them enjoy them. We shall do no more than 
rove through the European Garden, to cull its beau¬ 
ties, to arrange them into odoriferous significance, 
and to teach our refined and purifying science ^o 
those fair beings, the symbols of whose mortal 
beauty are but inadequately found in the most glo¬ 
rious flowers, and whose mental charms cannot be 
