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Flowers

Flowers image
Parent Issue
Day
21
Month
April
Year
1848
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

"We are spirit aromas Of blossom and bloom, We call your thoughts home, as Ye breathe our perfume." [Mrs. E. Barrett Browning.] Flowers, more perhaps, than any other of the works of nature, have a tendency to elevate and purify the soul. Mute worshippers of their Maker, they turn with reverence toward His glorious representative, the Sun, & fold themselves peacefully to slumber when he withdraws his enlivening rays. Some years since, while residing in one of our large cities, I had taken a ramble into the country for wild flowers, and returning with a bouquet of them in my hand, met a little girl, whose tattered garment and squalid appearance indicated a depth of poverty known only to the dwellers in cities. On seeing the bouquet she paused, and at length, summoning courage, she said, "Please, sir, will you give me some flowers?" Struck with the appearance of the child I gave her the bouquet, and curious to know what could lead a child, evidently so poor, to ask for flowers instead of food, followed her as she ran with eager haste down a narrow alley, toward a block of ruinous wood buildings. At one of these she paused, and ascending a much-worn flight of stairs, she entered a small atic-room, in one corner of which, upon a bundle of straw, lay a woman, whose pallid cheek and sunken eye too surely indicated the victim of want and disease. Never shall I forget the joyous look of the child, as, rushing toward the poor sufferer, she exclaimed, "Oh, mother, you will get well now, for I have brought you some wild flowers just like those that used to grow around our old home." These words told the whole history of the family - a happy home in the country exchanged for an uncomfortable one in the city, poverty and sickness following the removal, till their only solace was the remembrance of that country farm-house where the wild flowers bloomed around them, and all was contentment and happiness. But not alone to the poor are the flowers God's angels of consolation. In a stately mansion, adorned with every luxury which art could contrive or wealth procure, a beautiful girl lay upon a couch, a victim of that fell disease of our northern clime, Consumption. - Medical skill have done its utmost, and failed - she was dying. Ere disease had laid its hand upon her, she had loved to roam amid the wild flowers, and gather them to deck her room; and now, in her last moments, her old taste returned. Her sister sat by her side, overwhelmed with grief for the loss of one so lovely and beloved. Presently the voice of the dying girl fell faintly on her ear; "Ellen," she said, "will you go to the little ravine by the brook and gather me some wild flowers? Methinks I should like to gaze on them once more." Her sister complied, almost mechanically, with her request, and soon returned with a handful of pansies, geraniums, and anemones. The eye of the dying girl brightened, as she gazed on them. She took them in her thin, white hands, and looking upon them said, "Flowers, ye have added much to my happiness in life. I have loved ye for your purity and innocence, but like me ye are frail, and wither early. In the Paradise of God it is not so. The flowers there are unfading, lovlier far than these." She sank back, her eyes closed, and ere-her friends were aware, her spirit had gone to the Paradise she loved, to bloom in perennial beauty in the garden of God. L. P. B. Slander, by fixing her talons on the most virtuous characters, generally defeats her own malice, and proclaims their merit. [Zimmerman.] Whoever thinks must see that man was made To face the storm, not languish in the shade. Action his sphere, and for that sphere destined, Eternal pleasures open on his mind - "