But these aside, blessed be the man that really loves flowers!-loves them for their own sakes, for their beauty, their associations, the joy they have given and always will give; so that, if there was not another creature on earth to admire or praise, he would just as much sit down among them as friends and companions! But such men need no blessing of mine. They are blessed of God! Did He not make the world for such men? Are they not clearly the owners of the world, and the richest of all men ?

The end of art is to inoculate men with the love of nature. But those who have it in the natural way, need no pictures nor galleries. Spring is their designer, and the whole year their artist.

He who only does not appreciate floral beauty is to be pitied like any other man who is born imperfect. But men who contemptuously reject flowers as effeminate and unworthy of manhood, reveal their coarseness. Were flowers fit to eat or drink, were they stimulative of passions, or could they be gambled with like stocks and public consciences, they would take them up just where finer minds would drop them, who love them as revelations of God's sense of beauty; as addressed to the taste, and to something finer and deeper than taste, that power within us which spiritualizes matter, and communes with God through His work.

Many persons lose much of the enjoyment by indulging false associations.

The term weed ends the glory of some flowers. But all flowers are weeds, and somewhere our rarest flowers are somebody's commonest. Flowers growing in noisome places, in desolate corners, upon rubbish, or rank desolation, become disagreeable. Road-side flowers, ineradicable, and hardy beyond all discouragement, lose themselves from our sense of delicacy and protection. And, generally, there is a disposition to undervalue common flowers. If a plant be uncouth, it has no attractions

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to us simply because it has been brought from the ends of the earth, and is a "great rarity;" and if it has beauty, it is none the less but a great deal more attractive to us because it is common. It adds generosity to beauty. It gives joy to the poor, the rude, and to the multitudes who could have none, were nature to charge a price for her blossoms. Is a cloud less beautiful, or a sea, or a mountain prospect, because often seen, or seen by millions?

At any rate, while we lose no fondness for eminent and accomplished flowers, we are conscious of a growing respect for the democratic crowds. There is, for instance, the mullein of America, of but little beauty in each floweret, but a brave plant, growing cheerfully and heartily out of abandoned soils, ruffling its root with broad-palmed, generous, velvet leaves, and erecting therefrom a spire, that always inclines us to stop for a kindly look. This fine plant is left, by our American friends, like a decayed old gentleman, to a good-natured pity. But in other countries it is a flower, and called the "American velvet plant."

We confess to a homely enthusiasm for clover-not the white clover beloved of honey-bees, but the red clover. It holds up its round, honest head, with such rustic innocence! Do you ever see it without thinking of a sound, sensible, country lass, sun-browned and fearless as innocence always should be? We go past a field of red clover, like Solomon in a garden of spices. There is the burdock, too, with its prickly rosettes, that has little beauty or value, except as an amusement to children, who manufacture baskets and what not, of its burrs. But the thistle is a prince. Let any man, that has an eye for beauty, take a view of the whole plant, and see where is more expressive grace and symmetry, and where is there a more kingly flower? To be sure there are sharp objec tions to it in a bouquet; and most gardeners feel to

wards a thistle as boys toward a snake-and farmers, with more reason, dread it like a plague. But it is just as beautiful as if it were an universal favourite. What shall we say of mayweed, irreverently called dog-fennel by some? Its acid juice, its heavy pungent odour, make it disagreeable-and being disagreeable, its enormous Malthusian increase renders it hateful to damsels in white stockings, compelled to walk through it on dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and

devour it !

The first thing that defies the frost in spring is the chickweed. It will open its floral eye and look the thermometer in the face at thirty-two degrees; it leads out the snow-drop and crocus. As a harbinger and herald let it not be forgotten.

You cannot forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions. There are many green-house blossoms less pleasing to us than these. Moreover, their passing away is more spiritual than their bloom. Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe-a fairy dome of splendid

architecture.

As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, we shall never have a garden without them, both for their own sake, and for the sake of old-fashioned folks, who used to love them. Morning glories need no praising. The vine, the leaf, the exquisite vase-formed flower, the delicate and various colours, will secure it from neglect while taste remains. Grape-blossoms and mignonette do not appeal to the eye, and if they were selfish no man would care for them. Yet, because they pour their life out in fragrance, they are always loved; and, like homely people with noble hearts, they come to look beautiful by association. Nothing that produces constant pleasure in us can fail to seem beautiful. We do not need to speak for that universal favourite, the rose! As a flower is the

finest stroke of creation, so the rose is the happiest hit among flowers!

But we must not neglect the blossoms of fruittrees. What a great heart an apple-tree must have! What a generous work it makes of blossoming! Not a single bloom for each apple that is to be, but a profusion, a prodigality of them. The tree is but a huge bouquet; it gives you twenty times as much as there is need for, and evidently because it loves to blossom. We will praise this virtuous tree. Not beautiful in form, often clumpy, cragged, and rude; but glorious in beauty when efflorescent. Nor is it a beauty only at a distance. Pluck down a twig and examine as closely as you will; it will bear the nearest looking. The simplicity and purity of the white expanded flower, the half-open buds, slightly blushed, the little pink-tipped buds unopen, crowding up like rosy children around an elder brother or sister! Why, here is a cluster more beautiful than any you can make up artificially, and you may pick from the whole garden. Wear this family of buds for my sake, it is all the better for being common. I love a flower that all may have-that belongs to the whole, and not to a select and exclusive few. Common, forsooth! a flower cannot be worn out by much looking at, as a road is by much travel.

How one exhales and feels his childhood coming back to him, when, emerging from the hard and hateful city streets, he sees orchards and gardens in sheeted bloom, plum, cherry, pear, peach, and apple, waves and billows of blossoms, rolling over hills and down through the levels! My heart runs riot. This is a kingdom of glory. The bees know it. The very flies, that never seem to be thinking of anything, are rather sober and solemn here. Such a sight is equal to a sunset; a sunset is but a blossoming of the clouds.

We love to fancy that a flower is the point of

transition at which a material thing touches the immaterial; it is the sentient vegetable soil. We ascribe dispositions to it; we treat it as we would an innocent child. A stem or root has no suggestion of life. A leaf advances towards it, and some leaves are as fine as flowers, and have a grace of motion seldom had by flowers. But flowers seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others again, plain, honest, and upright, like the broadfaced sunflower and the hollyhock. We speak of them as laughing, as gay and coquettish, as nodding and dancing. But no man of sensibility ever spoke of a flower as he would of a fungus, a pebble, or a sponge. They are more lifelike than many animals. We commune with flowers, we go to them if we are sad or glad; but a toad, a worm, an insect, we repel as if real life was not half so real as imaginary life. What a pity they can utter no sound! A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle, oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!

When we hear melodious sounds, the wind among trees, the noise of a brook falling down deep into a leaf-covered cavity, birds' notes, especially at night, children's voices, as you ride into a village at dusk, far from your home, and long absent, and quite homesick; or a flute heard from out of a wood, a silver sound rising up among silver-lit leaves, into the moonlighted air; or the low conversations of persons whom you love, that sit at the fire in the room when you are convalescent; when we think of these things, we are apt to imagine nothing perfect that has not the gift of sound. But you change your mind when you dwell lovingly among flowers; they are always silent. Sound is never associated with them. They speak to you, but it is as the eye speaks, by vibrations of light and not of air.

It is with flowers as with friends. Many may be loved, but few much loved. Wild honeysuckles in