rts then 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 favorite 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 pas