The Project Gutenberg EBook of The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings, by
Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Title: The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Release Date: February 25, 2010 [EBook #31390]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The May Flower

and

Miscellaneous Writings

By Harriet Beecher Stowe

AUTHOR OF "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN," "SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS," ETC.

BOSTON:
PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, AND COMPANY,
13 WINTER STREET
1855.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by
PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, AND COMPANY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District
of Massachusetts.

STEREOTYPED AT THE
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.

[Illustration: Truly Yours, H B Stowe]

INTRODUCTION.

Mr. G. B. Emerson, in his late report to the legislature of
Massachusetts on the trees and shrubs of that state, thus describes
The May Flower.

"Often from beneath the edge of a snow bank are seen rising the
fragrant, pearly-white or rose-colored flowers of this earliest
harbinger of spring.

"It abounds in the edges of the woods about Plymouth, as elsewhere, and
must have been the first flower to salute the storm-beaten crew of the
Mayflower on the conclusion of their first terrible winter. Their
descendants have thence piously derived the name, although its bloom is
often passed before the coming in of May."

No flower could be more appropriately selected as an emblem token by the
descendants of the Puritans. Though so fragrant and graceful, it is
invariably the product of the hardest and most rocky soils, and seems to
draw its ethereal beauty of color and wealth of perfume rather from the
air than from the slight hold which its rootlets take of the