







THE LANGUAGE OF FLOIVERS. 

and throughout all lands, flowers should have been | 
chosen as emblems of thoughts and sentiments, 
and invested with a language of their own. Round 
many a flower beautiful thoughts cluster, and even 
He who was Lord of all, did not disdain, in the 
lessons He taught, to use as illustrations of great 
truths, the Lilies that toil not, neither do they 
spin; the Grape that cannot be gathered from the 
Thorn ; and the Wheat that shall be gathered in 
at the great harvest. 
Among the many legends connected with the 
flower language the following may be cited : 
The Daisy is taken by old Geoffrey Chaucer as | 
the type of beauty and admirable virtue, being the 
very flower into which the fair Queen Alceste—- 
who sacrificed her own life to preserve that of her 
husband—was changed. No pilgrim, bending at 
the shrine of the saint whom he considered the 
i most holy and worthy of adoration, ever offered 
more devout homage than did the ‘‘ father of 
English poetry” to this little ‘“Day’s Eye,” or 
“‘ Eye of Day,” as he loved to call it. 
The Almond Tree has been made the emblem of 
hope and also of vigilance; it belongs to the same 
family as the Peach; it flourishes luxuriantly in 
Syria, and sacred writers frequently derive from it 
very striking metaphors. We are told in Numbers, 
il:at Aaron’s rod was taken from the Almond Tree. 



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