and souls to enjoy, the pure pleasures that flow from a contemplation of the works of God in creation.
How beautiful is all nature in the springtime of flowers! How lovely are the woods when the young leaves are expanding,—when the first green garniture of summer is bursting into existence! The lowly hepatica opens its gemlike flowers at the foot of some lofty tree, eager to greet the first ray of summer-like sunshine that visits the earth. The tinted petals of the anemone quiver in the breeze, as the winds of the spring pass by. The early thalictrum exhibits its singular, flower-like tassels of purple and yellow. The delicate corydalis blooms on the bare rock; and the stranger who beholds it for the first time wonders that a flower of so much beauty should be bom to " blush unseen." Who can tread the green carpet of the earth, in the spring of the year, and not feel delighted at the first appearance of the modest houstonia, peeping out from among the young grass, and seeming, as an eminent naturalist beautifully expresses it, "like handfuls of the pale scattered flowers of the lilac, which had come too early to maturity"? The "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower," the mountain daisy, which the poet Burns buried with his ploughshare, and then sung its requiem in never-dying rhyme, was not more worthy of a poet's effort than this graceful harbinger of a New England summer.
A love of flowers has always ranked among the refined pleasures of a polished people. "Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered; let no flower of the spring pass by us," were the words of the royal sage, in the days of Israel's glory, when the sons of Jacob sat every man beneath his own vine and fig-tree,—when the roses of Sharon bloomed in the palaces of Jerusalem, and the daughters of Judah gathered lilies by the waters of Kedron, to scatter them in the courts of the Temple. No sooner had the warlike Roman conquered and incorporated the surrounding states, and made Rome the mistress of all Italy, than the villas of the Roman citizens studded the whole country, from the Straits of Messina to the mountains that formed her northern barrier. It was to embellish these, that the fruits and the flowers of the East were gathered by the Ro-
