Dugald Stewart, in his _Essay on the Cultivation of Intellectual
Habits_, predicates, in persons of mature age, what may be termed the
enjoyment of a second season of enjoyments far more refined than the
first. Thus he says: “Instances have frequently occurred of individuals
in whom the power of imagination has, at an advanced period of life,
been found susceptible of culture to a wonderful degree. In such men,
what an accession is gained to their most refined pleasures! What
enchantments are added to their most ordinary perceptions! The mind,
awakening, as if from a trance, to a new existence, becomes habituated
to the most interesting aspects of life and of nature; the intellectual
eye is ‘purged of its film;’ and things the most familiar and unnoticed
disclose charms invisible before. The same objects and events which were
lately beheld with indifference occupy now all the powers and capacities
of the soul, the contrast between the present and the past serving only
to enhance and to endear so unlooked-for an acquisition. What Gray has
so finely said of _the pleasures of vicissitude_ conveys but a faint
image of what is experienced by the man who, after having lost in vulgar
occupations and vulgar amusements his earliest and most precious years,
is thus introduced at last to a new heaven and a new earth:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are op’ning Paradise.
Nothing can be more deplorable than a man who has outlived the likings,
and perchance the innocence, of his early life; which is by no means
rare, if they have not grown out of the study and love of nature, for
this clings to the heart in all the vicissitudes of life,—in adversity
as well as in prosperity; in sickness as well as in health; even to
extreme old age, when almost every other worldly source of pleasure is
dried up. Hear the testimony of Hannah More, at the age of eighty-two:
“The only one of my youthful fond attachments,” says she, “which exists
still in full force, is a passion for scenery, raising flowers, and
landscape gardening.” Well indeed will it be for the young if they
follow the example of this venerable woman, and early acquire a passion
for scenery and flowers. For as they pass through life, they will find
the world often frowning upon them, but the flowers will always smile.
And it is sweet, in the day of adversity, to be met with a smile.
We remember a touching instance of the love of flowers lighting up the
last hours of a botanist who had wooed nature in the picturesque vale of
Mickleham, in Surrey. A few short hours before his death, he turned to
his niece and said: “Mary, it is a fine morning; go and see if _Scilla
verna_ is come in flower.”