which no one with a human heart can be quite indifferent. Few can doat
upon the distant flowers of the sky as many of us doat upon the flowers
at our feet. The stars are wholly independent of man: not so the sweet
children of Flora. We tend upon and cherish them with a parental pride.
They seem especially meant for man and man for them. They often need his
kindest nursing. We place them with guardian hand in the brightest light
and the most wholesome air. We quench with liquid life their sun-raised
thirst, or shelter them from the wintry blast, or prepare and enrich
their nutritious beds. As they pine or prosper they agitate us with
tender anxieties, or thrill us with exultation and delight. In the
little plot of ground that fronts an English cottage the flowers are
like members of the household. They are of the same family. They are
almost as lovely as the children that play with them--though their happy
human associates may be amongst

The sweetest things that ever grew
Beside a human door.

The Greeks called flowers the _Festival of the eye_: and so they are:
but they are something else, and something better.

A flower is not a flower alone,
A thousand sanctities invest it.

Flowers not only touch the heart; they also elevate the soul. They bind
us not entirely to earth; though they make earth delightful. They
attract our thoughts downward to the richly embroidered ground only to
raise them up again to heaven. If the stars are the scriptures of the
sky, the flowers are the scriptures of the earth. If the stars are a
more glorious revelation of the Creator's majesty and might, the flowers