Robes is a high dignitary in the Household of Royalty, and has her
place near to the person of the Queen. But the Floriculturist, of
educated perception and taste, is the master of a higher state robe,
and holds the key of embroidered vestments, cosmetics, tintings,
artistries, hair-jewels, head-dresses, brooches, and bracelets,
which no empress ever wore since human crowns were made; which
Nature herself could not show on all the bygone birthdays of her
being.

This is marvellous. It is an honor to man, put upon him from above,
as one of the gratuitous dignities of his being. "An undevout
astronomer is mad," said one who had opened his mind to a broad
grasp of the wonders which this upper heaven holds in its bosom.
The floriculturist is an astronomer, with Newton's telescope
reversed; and if its revelations do not stir up holy thoughts in his
soul, he is blind as well as mad. No glass, no geometry that Newton
ever lifted at the still star-worlds above, could do more than
_reveal_. At the farthest stretch of their faculty, they could only
bring to light the life and immortality of those orbs which the
human eye had never seen before. They could not tint nor add a ray
to one of them all. They never could bring down to the reach of
man's unaided vision a single star that Noah could not see through
the deck-lights of the ark. It was a gift and a glory that well
rewarded the science and genius of Newton and Herschel, of Adams and
Le Verrier, that they could ladder these mighty perpendicular
distances and climb the rounds to such heights and sweeps of
observation, and count, measure, and name orbs and orbits before
unknown, and chart the paths of their rotations and weigh them, as
in scales, while in motion. But this ge-astronomer, whose
observatory is his conservatory, whose telescope and fluxions are