Goldsmith's sympathy with the rural and the human is associated intimately with the hawthorn, " for whispering lovers made." Rosemary has been more emblematic of remembrance, since it was so offered by the "fair Ophelia;" and heart's-ease is consecrated by the elegant compliment to "the virgin throned by the West," to which it is indebted for the name of "love-in-idleness." The epicurean utilitarianism of Leigh Hunt recognized "comfort" in the feel of a geranium leaf; and who that has read with appreciation Miss Barrett's fine poem, elaborating the beautiful sentiment of the Bible, "He giveth his beloved sleep," can see a poppy, that gorgeous emblem of the drowsy god, without a benison on the thoughtful lyrist? I think that the yellow broom must have originally flourished in lonely places. For hours, I followed a mule-path in the most deserted part of Sicily, cheerful with its blossoms, whose rich yet delicate odor embalmed the air; hence the significance of Shakspeare's allusion to this flower, "which the dismissed bachelor loves, being lass-lorn." Campbell must have had an oppressive sense of the poisonous horror of nightshade, from his reference to it in the protest against skepticism as the natural companion of dismay. I have always thought the thistle an apposite symbol, not only of Scotland, but of her martyred queen – "its fragrant down set round with thorns, and rifled by the bee."

One of the most popular tales of the day –– "Picciola" –– is based upon the interest which a single flower may excite when it is the sole companion or a prisoner; and the favor this little romance has enjoyed, proves how natural is the sentiment it unfolds. The most serenely religious minds, however indifferent to art or scenery, are not infrequently alive to this feeling; the constant allusion to flowers, in a metaphorical way, in the Scriptures; the rich poetical meaning attached to them in the East; the lily that always appears in pictures of the Annunciation; the palm-leaves strewed in our Saviour's path; the crown of thorns woven for his brow, and his declaration of the field lilies, "that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them" – indicating that his pure eyes had momentarily rested on their familiar beauty – lend to such persons a hallowed sense of their attractiveness. There is yet another reason for this exception to a prosaic view of what is merely charming in itself, which those disposed to bigotry make in favor of flowers. It is, that they symbolize immortality. No common figure of speech is more impressive to the peasant than that which bids him see a "type of resurrection and second birth," in the germination of the seed, its growth, development, and blossoming. Again, too, there are the associations of childhood, whose first and most innocent acquisitions were gathered flowers, emblems of its own exuberance, offerings of its primitive love. I imagine the sense of color – now regarded as a separate and very unequally distributed faculty – is one of the earliest developed; it explains the intense gratification even of an infant at the sight of a tulip; and there is reason to believe that the hues of flowers are the most vivid tokens of enjoyment that greet the dawning mind.

The orientals, adopts in voluptuous ease, place vases of flowers around their fountains; and, as they lie upon divans, their eyes close, in the refreshing siesta, with these radiant sentinels for the last image to blend with their dreams, and their odor to mingle with the misty spray and cheer their waking. The Greek maidens dropped flowers from their windows on those that passed, to indicate their scorn, praise, or love. One of the poetic touches which redeem the frugal lot of the grisettes, is the habit they indulge of keeping a box of mignionette on their window-sills. You may see them at dawn bending over it, to sprinkle the roots or enjoy the perfume. In Tuscany and the Neapolitan territory, peasants wear gay flowers in their hats; while the more grave people of the intervening country rarely so adorn themselves. I was struck, at the wedding of an American in France, to see the servants, tearful at parting with their mistress, decorating the interior of her carriage with white flowers. There is something, however, very artificial in the dry immortels here and there dyed black, for sale at the gates of Pere la Chaise, and bought by the humbler class of mourners to hang on the crosses that mark the graves of kindred. Our own rural cemeteries are teaching a better lesson. The culture of flowers in such domains, is not only in excellent taste, but, when judiciously selected and arranged, a grateful memorial. At Monaco, a town in Italy, a few years since, the body of a young child was covered with flowers, according to the custom of the place; and when sought for the purpose of interment, it was found sitting up and playing with the flowers – an affecting and beautiful evidence of the ignorance of death characteristic of that spotless age.

Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency. It denudes the masculine face of the beard, its distinctive feature; substitutes for the harmonious movement of the chaste and blithesome dance, the angular caprices of the polka; clips and squares the picturesque in landscape into formalized proportions; and condemns half the world to an unattractive and inconvenient costume. Even flowers seem profaned by its touch; there is something morbid in their breath when exhaled profusely in gorgeous saloons and ostentatiously displayed at a heartless banquet; and wisely as the florist may adjust them into bouquets, they are so firmly entwined and intricately massed together, as often to resemble mosaic. We turn often from the most costly specimen of this appanage of the ball and opera, with a feeling of relief to the single white rosebud on a maiden's breast, or the light jasmin wreath on her brow. The quantity and showy combination of the flowers, especially the heated atmosphere and commonplace gabble of the scene, and often the want of correspondence between the person who so consciously holds the bouquet in her gloved hand and the sweet nature it represents, rob the flowers of their legitimate claim. Indeed, like all truly beautiful things, they demand the appropriate as a sphere. The east wind, in Boston, on the last national holiday, and the grave faces of the children, to say nothing of the idea that approbativeness and acquisitiveness were the organs mainly called in play in their little overworked brains, utterly dispelled all genuine romance and grateful illusion from the floral procession. Something analogous in character, atmosphere, and occasion, is needed to render the ministry of flowers affecting and complete.

We instinctively identify our acquaintances with flowers. The meek and dependent are as lilies of the valley, and, like them, need the broad and verdant shield of affectionate nurture; sycophants are parasites; exuberant and glowing beauty and reeling are more like the damask rose than anything in nature; the irritable annoy us like nettles; the proud emulate the crown imperial; the graceful are lithe as vine-sprays; the loving wind around our hearts like tendrils; and the cheerful brighten the dim background of life like the scarlet blossoms of the woodbine. Not a flower in the cornucopia of the floral goddess but hath its similitude and its votary. The boy's first miracle is to press the seed-vessels of the balsamine till it snaps at his touch; or shouts, as he runs from bed to the garden, at the sight of the rich chalice of the morning-glory, planted by his own little hand, that has opened while he slept. The clover's pink globe, and the deep crimson bloom of the sumac; the exquisite scent of the locust, and the auspicious blooming of the lilac; the hood-like purple of the fox-glove, and the dainty tint of the sweet pea, stir, whenever they reappear, those dormant memories of early and unalloyed consciousness, which

Thus, from the first, perverted mortal, thou wert indebted to flowers; –– as a wayward urchin, loitering on the way to school, thou whistled shrilly against the edge of a grass-blade, held a butter-cup to the chin of thy little comrade, or pulled away the feathery seed-blossom of the dandelion to ascertain if thy secret wish would be consummated; as a youth, with quivering pulses and flushed brow, thou wert not ashamed to seek the choicest flowers as interpreters of thy feelings towards one before whom thy words were tremulous, yet fond; and in thy prime, when positive knowledge and accurate deduction constituted thy felicity, it was, or might have been, to thee a rational pastime to study the botanical relations, laws, arid habits of these poetic effusions of the earth; causing them to gratify thee through analysis, as they once did through sentiment. And "in that Indian summer of the soul," that descends on frosty age, how do flowers serve as the magic connecting bond that unites senility and childhood! The eye of age softens as it beholds the shower of blossoms from the fruit-trees, thinks of its own flowery day, and is thankful for a serene maturity. Thus have flowers an utterance everywhere and always; the wild columbine, on its thread-like stem, that hangs on the stony cliff; the fungus, that swells from the mouldering trunk of gigantic forest-trees; the tropical exotics of the stuffo, that almost bewilder in their strange beauty; and the buds that open beneath Alpine snows, address our sense of adventure, of wonder, and of gentleness, in quiet, yet persuasive appeals, that sometimes we cannot choose but heed.

The fondness of the Dutch for tulip, it may be conjectured, is partly owing to the flatness of their country, as well as its alluvial soil; the absence of picturesque variety in form, inducing a craving for the most vivid sensations from color. Perhaps the compactness and neat growth of bulbous roots, so adapted to their cleanly and well-arranged domicils, somewhat accounts for the exquisite degree of cultivation to which they bring this species of flowers, It is one characteristic advantage of such natural ornaments, that a few well selected, or even one in a room or in the midst of a grass-plat, will diffuse refreshment and excite imagination. Thus the flowers that cluster on the roofs of Genoa, and the little knot of violets imbedded in geranium leaves dispensed by the flower-girls in Tuscany, are more pleasing than if the display were greater. On re-visiting a city of the latter State, after years of absence, as I followed the lagging porter who carried my luggage, in the twilight of early morning, I was startled by a cordial exclamation, "Ben tornato, 0 ben tornato, signore!" and looking down a narrow street, I saw the flower-girl from whom I had so long ago been accustomed to purchase, gayly advancing with a bouquet. It was a welcome such as awaits the traveler in few countries, and one which touched the heart with cheerful augury. There is, indeed, something in flowers redolent of hope and suggestive of amity. Their very universality renders them eloquent of greeting. The fair, maternal bosom of Titian's Flora has a significance beyond that which artists recognize; it proclaims Nature as a beneficent parent, lavishly dispensing the flowers that strew life's rugged path with sweet monitions and grateful refreshment. How, in the season of vivid emotion, has the unexpected sight of a pale crocus, bursting from the mould in early spring; the teeming odor of a magnolia, tossed on a summer breeze; or the green flakes of a larch, powdered with snowy crystal in the winter sun, kindled the very frame with a kind of mysterious delight! There is, to the poetical sense, a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers, that now and then, from the influence of mood or circumstance, re-asserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood or the spell of love. Then we realize that they are the survivors of our lost paradise; the types of what is spontaneous, inspiring, and unprofaned in life and humanity; the harbingers of a blissful futurity. It was, therefore, in a rational as well' as a fanciful spirit, that trees were consecrated into emblems and auguries; that the willow, in its meek flexibility, was made the insignia of desertion; the cypress, in its solemn and dense foliage, of death; the enduring amaranth, of immortality; and the classic-shaped and bright, green leaves of the laurel, of fame. Not only in their native traits, but in their almost sympathetic habits, flowers come near our affections. How patiently the ivy binds the disjointed stones of a ruined edifice, and the moss creeps over the gray and time-stained roots and rocks, as if to cover their decay and relieve their sterility! With what a wreathing protection clusters the woodbine round the humble porch! The field flowers, some one has truly said, smile up to us as children to the face of a father; and the seeds of those destined for birds, fly on innumerable wings of down, to germinate the more abundantly. The warm hues of the dahlia would be oppressive in any other season than autumn; and the glitter of the ocean's strand is chastened by the gay weeds whose variegated tints are freshened by every wave that dies along the beach. Even this herbal, the repository of memorials gleaned from hallowed scenes, or treasured as the fragile trophies of joys as fragile, " strikes the electric chain" of imagination and memory with a deeper vibration than a sketch-book or a diary. That little cluster of thin, pale, green leaves, with a shade of delicate brown at the edges (called by the Italians the Hair of Venus), which clings to the page as if painted on its surface, once hung from the dark, rocky wall of the remarkable cavern in Syracuse, called the Ear of Dionysius; and as I look upon it, 'the deserted bay, crumbling tombs, and wreck-strewn campagna of that ancient site, are vividly before me; even the flavor of the Hybla honey and the echo of the mule's tramp return to my senses. This weed, so common in shape and hue that it needs a reminiscence to justify its preservation, was plucked as I stood tip-toe on the edge of a gondola, and held fast to old Antonio's shoulder, while he checked his oar beneath the Bridge of Sighs, and I snatched it from the interstices of the arch. The Piazza of San Marco; the Adriatic, glowing with the flush of sunset; the lonely canals, and all the gray quietude of Venice, are conjured by the withered memento, "as at the touch of an enchanter's wand." More costly acquisitions have yielded less zest in the winning than this slender yellow flower, which, evading the jealous watchfulness of the guard at Pompeii, I gathered to assure myself thenceforth that I had actually walked the streets of the buried city. How venerable seems this bunch of grass and flowers that drew its sustenance from the loamy walls of the Colosseum; and with how marvelous a freshness do I call up the medieval architecture, exquisite campanile, and mountain boundaries of Florence, beholding again the anenome purloined on a fine Sabbath morning in the gardens of the Boboli! I cannot see this cassia blossom without feeling a certain impulsion to monastic life, as I think of the kind friars, the noble organ, lava-heaped confines and soothing retirement of the Benedectine convent, at Cattania, whence I bore it as the memento of one of those white days in the traveler's experience, that atone for a thousand discomforts. Pleasant was the summer evening, at Messina, when, in one of the palaces that line the marina, we kept gay vigil in order to witness the blooming of this faded cereus; and high beat the pulses of an entranced multitude on the night this faded nosegay was pressed to the lips of Amina, in that last scena, when her voice quivered with uncontrollable feeling, and caroled the "Ah, non giunge," in tones of such pathetic delight as brought a tear to the sternest eye. I will not throw away this rusty-looking japonica, but keep it as a talisman to guard me from the fascination of heartless beauty, reflecting on the character of the brilliant–––, in whose dark hair it rested during the last ball of her triumphant season; that bewitching face displaying every phase of expression, while not one look was inspired by a soul, any more than this flower, in its graceful prime, was imbued with fragrance. Far different is the association that endears the scarlet honeysuckle and white hollyhock beside it. Through peaceful hours, that overflowed with unuttered tenderness and an ecstatic sense of geniality and recognition, I watched beside one I loved, the humming-bird and the bee sipping the nectar from their chalices, and compared the luxurious pastime with my own. Nor will I cease to treasure this orange-blossom, given me by the dark-eyed Palermitan, in the grove of her father's domain, when the air was filled with the odor of the sweet south, and musical with the far-off chime of the vesper-bells. The scent of this grape-blossom is associated with the hospitality of a villa, below Fiesole; and that heliotrope makes me think of a fair invalid with whom I wandered among the ilexes of a palace-garden, in whose grassy walks the vanilla flower grew profusely. I caved the reedy leaf that is stitched to the opposite page, as one of the countless proofs of the thoughtful care of my motherly hostess, at–––. She stuck it in my window on Palm Sunday. When gleaned, in a field near Lucca, this little flax-blossom held a dew-drop, and looked like the tearful blue eye of a child. Arid as it is, the pink, star-like flower beneath, whispers of romance. At a pic-nic, a friend of mine, who has an extreme impatience of tenter-hooks, determined to have his position with a certain fair one defined, as, after some encouragement, she seemed half-inclined for another. With true feminine tact, she had avoided an interview, though they constantly met. I believe she either could not decide between the two, or hated to give up my friend. He laughingly proposed, while we were resting in a meadow, to make his favorite a sybil; and handed her a knot of these starry flowers, to pluck the leaves one by one, and reveal the hearts of the company, according to a familiar game. When the time came to apply the test to her own sentiments, she was visibly embarrassed. He fixed his calm eye upon her face; and I, knowing at once his delicacy and his superstition, felt that this was a crisis. The lovely creature's voice trembled, when, half petulantly, and with visible disappointment, she plucked away the last leaf, which proved her only his well-wisher. The omen was accepted, and my friend soon had

Flowers are the most unobjectionable and welcome of gifts. There is a delicacy in selecting an offering, whether of gratitude, kindness, or affection, that sometimes puzzles a considerate mind; but where any such hesitancy occurs, we can turn to flowers with complacency. Nature furnishes them, and all her beautiful products may bravely challenge fastidiousness. No human being, not utterly perverted, can scorn flowers; nor can they be offered, even to the spoiled child of fortune, without an implied compliment to taste. The fairest of Eve's daughters, and the proudest scion of nobility, as well as the village beauty; the most gifted and the least cultivated, provided either imagination or heart exists, must feel gratified at such a tribute, whether from dependent or equal, new acquaintance or faithful lover. Like all spontaneous attractions, that of flowers gives them immunity from ordinary rules. They are so lovely and so frail, that, like children, they bespeak indulgence ere they offend. Of all material things, they excite the most chivalric sentiment; and hence are given and received, scattered and woven, cultivated and gathered, worn and won, with a more generous and refined spirit than any other ornaments. They are radiant hieroglyphics, sculptured on the earth's bosom; perhaps the legacy of angels; but certainly overflowing with messages of love that are apart from the work-day scenes and prosaic atmosphere of common life, and allied to better moments; to the sweet episodes of existence, to the promises of faith, and the memories of youth; and hence they are consecrated, and, like "the quality of mercy," bless "him that gives and her that takes."

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