experienced the beatitude of another and a better world,) were perfectly angelic-and mocked all attempt at description. "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven!"

O flower of an earthly spring! destined to blossom in the eternal summer of another and more genial region! Loveliest of lovely children-loveliest to the last! More beautiful in death than aught still living! Thou seemest now to all who miss and mourn thee but a sweet name-a fair vision-a precious memory;--but in reality thou art a more truly living thing than thou wert before or than aught thou hast left behind. Thou hast come early into a rich inheritance. Thou hast now a substantial existence, a genuine glory, an everlasting possession, beyond the sky. Thou hast exchanged the frail flowers that decked thy bier for amaranthine hues and fragrance, and the brief and uncertain delights of mortal being for the eternal and perfect felicity of angels!

I never behold elsewhere any of the specimens of the several varieties of flowers which the afflicted parent consigned to the hallowed little coffin without recalling to memory the sainted child taking her last rest on earth. The mother was a woman of taste and sensibility, of high mind and gentle heart, with the liveliest sense of the loveliness of all lovely things; and it is hardly necessary to remind the reader how much refinement such as hers may sometimes alleviate the severity of sorrow. Byron tells us that the stars are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

But might we not with equal justice say that every thing excellent and beautiful and precious has named itself a flower?

If stars teach as well as shine-so do flowers. In "still small accents" they charm "the nice and delicate ear of thought" and sweetly whisper that "the hand that made them is divine."

The stars are the poetry of heaven-the clouds are the poetry of the middle sky-the flowers are the poetry of the earth. The last is the loveliest to the eye and the nearest to the heart. It is incomparably the sweetest external poetry that Nature provides for man. Its attractions are the most popular its

language is the most intelligible. It is of all others the best adapted to every variety and degree of mind. It is the most endearing, the most familiar, the most homefelt, and congenial. The stars are for the meditation of poets and philosophers; but flowers are not exclusively for the gifted or the scientific; they are the property of all. They address themselves to our common nature. They are equally the delight of the innocent little prattler and the thoughtful sage. Even the rude unlettered rustic betrays some feeling for the beautiful in the presence of the lovely little community of the field and garden. He has no sympathy for the stars: they are too mystical and remote. But the flowers as they blush and smile beneath his eye may stir the often deeply hidden lovingness and gentleness of his nature. They have a social and domestic aspect to which no one with a human heart can be quite indifferent. Few can doat upon the distant flowers of the sky as many of us doat upon the flowers at our feet. The stars are wholly independent of man not so the sweet children of Flora. We tend upon and cherish them with a parental pride. They seem especially meant for man and man for them. They often need his kindest nursing. We place them with guardian hand in the brightest light and the most wholesome air. We quench with liquid life their sun-raised thirst, or shelter them from the wintry blast, or prepare and enrich their nutritious beds. As they pine or prosper they agitate us with tender anxieties, or thrill us with exultation and delight. In the little plot of ground that fronts an English cottage the flowers are like members of the household. They are of the same family. They are almost as lovely as the children that play with them—though their happy human associates may be amongst

The sweetest things that ever grew

Beside a human door.

The Greeks called flowers the Festival of the eye and so they are but they are something else, and something better.

A flower is not a flower alone,

A thousand sanctities invest it.

Flowers not only touch the heart; they also elevate the soul. They bind us not entirely to earth; though they make

earth delightful. They attract our thoughts downward to the richly embroidered ground only to raise them up again to heaven. If the stars are the scriptures of the sky, the flowers are the scriptures of the earth. If the stars are a more glorious revelation of the Creator's majesty and might, the flowers are at least as sweet a revelation of his gentler attributes. It has been observed that

An undevout astronomer is mad.

The same thing may be said of an irreverent floriculturist, and with equal truth-perhaps indeed with greater. For the astronomer, in some cases, may be hard and cold, from indulging in habits of thought too exclusively mathematical. But the true lover of flowers has always something gentle and genial in his nature. He never looks upon his floral-family without a sweetened smile upon his face and a softened feeling in his heart; unless his temperament be strangely changed and his mind disordered. The poets, who, speaking generally, are constitutionally religious, are always delighted readers of the flower-illumined pages of the book of nature. One of these disciples of Flora earnestly exclaims :

Were I, O God, in churchless lands remaining

Far from all voice of teachers and divines,

My soul would find in flowers of thy ordaining
Priests, sermons, shrines.

The popular little preachers of the field and garden, with their lovely faces, and angelic language-sending the while such ambrosial incense up to heaven-insinuate the sweetest truths into the human heart. They lead us to the delightful conclusion that beauty is in the list of the utilities—that the Divine Artist himself is a lover of loveliness--that he has communicated a taste for it to his creatures: and most lavishly provided for its gratification.

Not a flower

But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires

Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the sea-side sands
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth.

Cowper.

In the eye of Utilitarianism the flowers are but idle shows. God might indeed have made this world as plain as a Quaker's garment, without retrenching one actual necessary of physical existence; but He has chosen otherwise; and no earthly potentate was ever so richly clad as his mother earth. "Behold the lilies of the field, they spin not, neither do they toil, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these!" We are thus instructed that man was not meant to live by bread alone, and that the gratification of a sense of beauty is equally innocent and natural and refining. The rose is permitted to spread its sweet leaves to the air and dedicate its beauty to the sun, in a way that is quite perplexing to bigots and stoics and political economists. Yet God has made nothing in vain! The Great Artist of the Universe must have scattered his living hues and his forms of grace over the surface of the earth for some especial and worthy purpose. When Voltaire was congratulated on the rapid growth of his plants, he observed that "they had nothing else to do." Oh, yes-they had something else to do,-they had to adorn the earth, and to charm the human eye, and through the eye to soften and cheer the heart and elevate the soul!

I have often wished that Lecturers on Botany, instead of confining their instructions to the mere physiology, or anatomy, or classification or nomenclature of their favourite science, would go more into the poetry of it, and teach young people to appreciate the moral influences of the floral tribes-to draw honey for the human heart from the sweet breasts of flowers-to sip from their radiant chalices a delicious medicine for the soul.

Flowers are frequently hallowed by associations far sweeter than their sweetest perfume. "I am no botanist :" says Southey in a letter to Walter Savage Landor, "but like you, my earliest and best recollections are connected with flowers, and they always carry me back to other days. Perhaps this is because they are the only things which affect our senses precisely as they did in our childhood. The sweetness of the violet is always the same; and when you rifle a rose and drink, as it were, its fragrance, the refreshment is the same to the old man

as to the boy. Sounds recal the past in the same manner, but they do not bring with them individual scenes like the cowslip field, or the corner of the garden to which we have transplanted field-flowers."

George Wither has well said in commendation of his Muse: Her divine skill taught me this;

That from every thing I saw
I could some instruction draw,
And raise pleasure to the height
By the meanest object's sight,
By the murmur of a spring
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread
Shut, when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me

Than all Nature's beauties can

In some other wiser man.

We must not interpret the epithet wiser too literally. Perhaps the poet speaks ironically, or means by some other wiser man, one allied in character and temperament to a modern utilitarian Philosopher. Wordsworth seems to have had the lines of George Wither in his mind when he said

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Thomas Campbell, with a poet's natural gallantry, has exclaimed,

Without the smile from partial Beauty won,

Oh what were man ?-a world without a sun!

Let a similar compliment be presented to the "painted populace that dwell in fields and lead ambrosial lives." What a desert were this scene without its flowers-it would be like the sky of night without its stars! "The disenchanted earth" would “lose her lustre." Stars of the day! Beautifiers of the world! Ministrants of delight! Inspirers of kindly emotions and the holiest meditations! Sweet teachers of the serenest wisdom! So beautiful and bright, and graceful, and fragrantit is no marvel that ye are equally the favorites of the rich and