A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves _a star_.
But might we not with equal justice say that every thing excellent and
beautiful and precious has named itself _a flower_?
If stars teach as well as shine--so do flowers. In "still small accents"
they charm "the nice and delicate ear of thought" and sweetly whisper
that "the hand that made them is divine."
The stars are the poetry of heaven--the clouds are the poetry of the
middle sky--the flowers are the poetry of the earth. The last is the
loveliest to the eye and the nearest to the heart. It is incomparably
the sweetest external poetry that Nature provides for man. Its
attractions are the most popular; its language is the most intelligible.
It is of all others the best adapted to every variety and degree of
mind. It is the most endearing, the most familiar, the most homefelt,
and congenial. The stars are for the meditation of poets and
philosophers; but flowers are not exclusively for the gifted or the
scientific; they are the property of all. They address themselves to our
common nature. They are equally the delight of the innocent little
prattler and the thoughtful sage. Even the rude unlettered rustic
betrays some feeling for the beautiful in the presence of the lovely
little community of the field and garden. He has no sympathy for the
stars: they are too mystical and remote. But the flowers as they blush
and smile beneath his eye may stir the often deeply hidden lovingness
and gentleness of his nature. They have a social and domestic aspect to
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
are at least as sweet a revelation of his gentler attributes. It has
been observed that
An undevout astronomer is mad.
The same thing may be said of an irreverent floriculturist, and with
equal truth--perhaps indeed with greater. For the astronomer, in some
cases, may be hard and cold, from indulging in habits of thought too
exclusively mathematical. But the true lover of flowers has always
something gentle and genial in his nature. He never looks upon his
floral-family without a sweetened smile upon his face and a softened
feeling in his heart; unless his temperament be strangely changed and
his mind disordered. The poets, who, speaking generally, are
constitutionally religious, are always delighted readers of the
flower-illumined pages of the book of nature. One of these disciples of
Flora earnestly exclaims:
Were I, O God, in churchless lands remaining
Far from all voice of teachers and divines,
My soul would find in flowers of thy ordaining
Priests, sermons, shrines
The popular little preachers of the field and garden, with their lovely
faces, and angelic language--sending the while such ambrosial incense up
to heaven--insinuate the sweetest truths into the human heart. They lead
us to the delightful conclusion that beauty is in the list of
the _utilities_--that the Divine Artist himself is _a lover of
loveliness_--that he has communicated a taste for it to his creatures
and most lavishly provided for its gratification.
Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odours, and imparts then hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the sea side sands
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth.
_Cowper_.
In the eye of Utilitarianism the flowers are but idle shows. God might
indeed have made this world as plain as a Quaker's garment, without
retrenching one actual necessary of physical existence; but He has
chosen otherwise; and no earthly potentate was ever so richly clad as
his mother earth. "Behold the lilies of the field, they spin not,
neither do they toil, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these!" We are thus instructed that man was not meant to live by
bread alone, and that the gratification of a sense of beauty is equally
innocent and natural and refining. The rose is permitted to spread its
sweet leaves to the air and dedicate its beauty to the sun, in a way
that is quite perplexing to bigots and stoics and political economists.
Yet God has made nothing in vain! The Great Artist of the Universe must
have scattered his living hues and his forms of grace over the surface
of the earth for some especial and worthy purpose. When Voltaire was
congratulated on the rapid growth of his plants, he observed that "_they
had nothing else to do_." Oh, yes--they had something else to do,--they
had to adorn the earth, and to charm the human eye, and through the eye
to soften and cheer the heart and elevate the soul!
I have often wished that Lecturers on Botany, instead of confining their
instructions to the mere physiology, or anatomy, or classification or
nomenclature of their favorite science, would go more into the poetry
of it, and teach young people to appreciate the moral influences of the
floral tribes--to draw honey for the human heart from the sweet breasts
of flowers--to sip from their radiant chalices a delicious medicine for
the soul.
Flowers are frequently hallowed by associations far sweeter than their
sweetest perfume. "I am no botanist:" says Southey in a letter to Walter
Savage Landor, "but like you, my earliest and best recollections are
connected with flowers, and they always carry me back to other days.
Perhaps this is because they are the only things which affect our senses
precisely as they did in our childhood. The sweetness of the violet is
always the same; and when you rifle a rose and drink, as it were, its
fragrance, the refreshment is the same to the old man as to the boy.
Sounds recal the past in the same manner, but they do not bring with
them individual scenes like the cowslip field, or the corner of the
garden to which we have transplanted field-flowers."
George Wither has well said in commendation of his Muse:
Her divine skill taught me this;
That from every thing I saw
I could some instruction draw,
And raise pleasure to the height
By the meanest object's sight,
By the murmur of a spring
_Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread
Shut, when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree_,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man.
We must not interpret the epithet _wiser_ too literally. Perhaps the
poet speaks ironically, or means by some other _wiser man_, one allied
in character and temperament to a modern utilitarian Philosopher.
Wordsworth seems to have had the lines of George Wither in his mind when
he said
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Thomas Campbell, with a poet's natural gallantry, has exclaimed,
Without the smile from partial Beauty won,
Oh! what were man?--a world without a sun!
Let a similar compliment be presented to the "painted populace that
dwell in fields and lead ambrosial lives." What a desert were this scene
without its flowers--it would be like the sky of night without its
stars! "The disenchanted earth" would "lose her lustre." Stars of the
day! Beautifiers of the world! Ministrants of delight! Inspirers of
kindly emotions and the holiest meditations! Sweet teachers of the
serenest wisdom! So beautiful and bright, and graceful, and fragrant--it
is no marvel that ye are equally the favorites of the rich and the poor,
of the young and the old, of the playful and the pensive!
Our country, though originally but sparingly endowed with the living
jewelry of nature, is now rich in the choicest flowers of all other
countries.
Foreigners of many lands,
They form one social shade, as if convened
By magic summons of the Orphean lyre.
_Cowper_.
These little "foreigners of many lands" have been so skilfully
acclimatized and multiplied and rendered common, that for a few
shillings an English peasant may have a parterre more magnificent than
any ever gazed upon by the Median Queen in the hanging gardens of
Babylon. There is no reason, indeed, to suppose that even the first
parents of mankind looked on finer flowers in Paradise itself than are
to be found in the cottage gardens that are so thickly distributed over
the hills and plains and vallies of our native land.
The red rose, is the red rose still, and from the lily's cup
An odor fragrant as at first, like frankincense goes up.
_Mary Howitt_.
Our neat little gardens and white cottages give to dear old England that
lovely and cheerful aspect, which is so striking and attractive to her
foreign visitors. These beautiful signs of a happy political security
and individual independence and domestic peace and a love of order and a
homely refinement, are scattered all over the land, from sea to sea.
When Miss Sedgwick, the American authoress, visited England, nothing so
much surprised and delighted her as the gay flower-filled gardens of our
cottagers. Many other travellers, from almost all parts of the world,
have experienced and expressed the same sensations on visiting our
shores, and it would be easy to compile a voluminous collection of their
published tributes of admiration. To a foreign visitor the whole country
seems a garden--in the words of Shakespeare--"a _sea-walled garden_."
In the year 1843, on a temporary return to England after a long Indian
exile, I travelled by railway for the first time in my life. As I glided
on, as smoothly as in a sledge, over the level iron road, with such
magical rapidity--from the pretty and cheerful town of Southampton to
the greatest city of the civilized world--every thing was new to me, and
I gave way to child-like wonder and child-like exultation.[002] What a
quick succession of lovely landscapes greeted the eye on either side?
What a garden-like air of universal cultivation! What beautiful smooth
slopes! What green, quiet meadows! What rich round trees, brooding over
their silent shadows! What exquisite dark nooks and romantic lanes! What
an aspect of unpretending happiness in the clean cottages, with their
little trim gardens! What tranquil grandeur and rural luxury in the
noble mansions and glorious parks of the British aristocracy! How the
love of nature thrilled my heart with a gentle and delicious agitation,
and how proud I felt of my dear native land! It is, indeed, a fine thing
to be an Englishman. Whether at home or abroad, he is made conscious of
the claims of his country to respect and admiration. As I fed my eyes on
the loveliness of Nature, or turned to the miracles of Art and Science
on every hand, I had always in my mind a secret reference to the effect
which a visit to England must produce upon an intelligent and observant
foreigner.
Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around
Of hills and dales and woods and lawns and spires,
And glittering towns and gilded streams, 'till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays!
Happy Brittannia! where the Queen of Arts,
Inspiring vigor, Liberty, abroad
Walks unconfined, even to thy farthest cots,
And scatters plenty with unsparing hand.
_Thomson_.
And here let me put in a word in favor of the much-abused English
climate. I cannot echo the unpatriotic discontent of Byron when he
speaks of
The cold and cloudy clime
Where he was born, but where he would not die.
Rather let me say with the author of "_The Seasons_," in his address to
England.
Rich is thy soil and merciful thy clime.
King Charles the Second when he heard some foreigners condemning our
climate and exulting in their own, observed that in his opinion that was
the best climate in which a man could be out in the open air with
pleasure, or at least without trouble and inconvenience, the most days
of the year and the most hours of the day; and this he held was the case
with the climate of England more than that of any other country in
Europe. To say nothing of the lovely and noble specimens of human nature
to which it seems so congenial, I may safely assert that it is
peculiarly favorable, with, rare exceptions, to the sweet children of
Flora. There is no country in the world in which there are at this day
such innumerable tribes of flowers. There are in England two thousand
varieties of the rose alone, and I venture to express a doubt whether
the richest gardens of Persia or Cashmere could produce finer specimens
of that universal favorite than are to be found in some of the small but
highly cultivated enclosures of respectable English rustics.
The actual beauty of some of the commonest flowers in our gardens can be
in no degree exaggerated--even in the daydreams of the most inspired
poet. And when the author of Lalla Rookh talks so musically and
pleasantly of the fragrant bowers of Amberabad, the country of Delight,
a Province in Jinnistan or Fairy Land, he is only thinking of the
shrubberies and flower-beds at Sloperton Cottage, and the green hills
and vales of Wiltshire.
Sir William Temple observes that "besides the temper of our climate
there are two things particular to us, that contribute much to the
beauty and elegance of our gardens--which are, _the gravel of our walks
and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf_."
"The face of England is so beautiful," says Horace Walpole, "that I do
not believe that Tempe or Arcadia was half so rural; for both lying in
hot climates must have wanted _the moss of our gardens_." Meyer, a
German, a scientific practical gardener, who was also a writer on
gardening, and had studied his art in the Royal Gardens at Paris, and
afterwards visited England, was a great admirer of English Gardens, but
despaired of introducing our style of gardening into Germany, _chiefly
on account of its inferior turf for lawns_. "Lawns and gravel walks,"
says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, "are the pride of English
Gardens," "The smoothness and verdure of our lawns," continues the same
writer, "is the first thing in our gardens that catches the eye of a
foreigner; the next is the fineness and firmness of our gravel walks."
Mr. Charles Mackintosh makes the same observation. "In no other country
in the world," he says, "do such things exist." Mrs. Stowe, whose _Uncle
Tom_ has done such service to the cause of liberty in America, on her
visit to England seems to have been quite as much enchanted with our
scenery, as was her countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick. I am pleased to find
Mrs. Stowe recognize the superiority of English landscape-gardening and
of our English verdure. She speaks of, "the princely art of
landscape-gardening, for which England is so famous," and of "_vistas of
verdure and wide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green_ as the
velvet moss sometimes seen growing on rocks in new England." "Grass," she
observes, "is an art and a science in England--it is an institution. The
pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling and
otherwise nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the often-falling
tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be
appreciated." This is literally true: any sight more inexpressibly
exquisite than that of an English lawn in fine order is what I am quite
unable to conceive.[003]
I recollect that in one of my visits to England, (in 1827) I attempted
to describe the scenery of India to William Hazlitt--not the living son
but the dead father. Would that he were still in the land of the living
by the side of his friend Leigh Hunt, who has been pensioned by the
Government for his support of that cause for which they were both so
bitterly persecuted by the ruling powers in days gone by. I flattered
myself into the belief that Hazlitt was interested in some of my
descriptions of Oriental scenes. What moved him most was an account of
the dry, dusty, burning, grassless plains of Bundelcund in the hot
season. I told him how once while gasping for breath in a hot verandah
and leaning over the rails I looked down upon the sun-baked ground.
"A change came o'er the spirit of my dream."
I suddenly beheld with all the distinctness of reality the rich, cool,
green, unrivalled meads of England. But the vision soon melted away, and
I was again in exile. I wept like a child. It was like a beautiful
mirage of the desert, or one of those waking dreams of home which have
sometimes driven the long-voyaging seaman to distraction and urged him
by an irresistible impulse to plunge headlong into the ocean.
When I had once more crossed the wide Atlantic--and (not by the
necromancy of imagination but by a longer and more tedious transit)
found myself in an English meadow,--I exclaimed with the poet,
Thou art free
My country! and 'tis joy enough and pride
For one hour's perfect bliss, _to tread the grass
Of England once again_.
I felt my childhood for a time renewed, and was by no means disposed to
second the assertion that
"Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower."
I have never beheld any thing more lovely than scenery
characteristically English; and Goldsmith, who was something of a
traveller, and had gazed on several beautiful countries, was justified
in speaking with such affectionate admiration of our still more
beautiful England,
Where lawns extend that scorn Arcadian pride.
It is impossible to put into any form of words the faintest
representation of that delightful summer feeling which, is excited in
fine weather by the sight of the mossy turf of our country. It is sweet
indeed to go,
Musing through the _lawny_ vale:
alluded to by Warton, or over Milton's "level downs," or to climb up
Thomson's
Stupendous rocks
That from the sun-redoubling valley lift
Cool to the middle air their _lawny_ tops.
It gives the Anglo-Indian Exile the heart-ache to think of these
ramblings over English scenes.