SACREDNESS OF FLOWERS.
“Consider the lilies.”—Matt. vi. 28.
“Glorious beauty is a fading flower.”—Isa. xxviii. 1.
“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.”—1 Pet. i. 24.
Ye silent poems! which from nature's book
Warble of Eden to our inward ear,
Filling the thoughtful eyes that on ye look
With the soft mystery of a sacred tear,
Not the chaste stars, whose placid eyes salute
The musing gaze of man's poetic mind,
Throned in their skyey radiance,—dare dispute
The spell ye wield o'er every heart refined.
Since God, from Whose ideal wealth of thought
All that is bright, or beautiful, or fair,
By shaping wisdom into form was wrought
And thus committed unto sun and air,
Made the wild flowers like earth-sprung stars to shine
With gleams of almost sacramental power,—
Dull is the heart which hails no tone divine
When these accost him from their vernal bower!
Nor dream, that He who marks a sparrow's flight
Forgets the dew-fed darlings of the Spring;
Angels are not more surely in His sight
Than the soft flowers which breeze and brightness bring.
For such adjustment doth His hand ordain
Amid all forms and faculties to be,
That 'tween the snow-drop and vast earth must reign
Proportions pure as Science loves to see.
Were the huge world one atom more or less
In majesty, from centre to the pole,
The flowers might lose their bending loveliness,
Like living sympathies with nature's Whole.
And in man's world, where sin and woe prevail,
Harshness, and heat, and hurry so abound,
How sweet the hush of some sequester'd dale
Where slaves grow freemen upon nature's ground!
There can we hold communion meek and mild
With flowers, which deck some grove, or vernal wood,
And guard their innocence as undefiled
As when their greeting Maker call'd them “good.”
Orphans of Eden, their parental soil
Has long been wither'd, and by weeds o'errun;
While burden'd Manhood, with a brow of toil,
Endures the desert, and outworks the sun;
But these, like babes whose mother we deplore,
Still do their budding features love to keep
A soft sad trace of paradise no more,
And waken memories that well may weep.
Of old, before the God Incarnate came,
Oft did high song, and sentiment, and art
Borrow from flowers an ever-beauteous fame
Which feeds the mind, and purifies the heart.
But since the hour a lily blush'd, and bow'd
Its head of grace beneath Emmanuel's smile,
Divine and deep associations crowd
The dreaming soul which o'er them bends awhile.
“Behold the lilies of the field, and learn
From their sweet lives, who neither toil, nor spin,”—
Well may such consecrating words return,
And waken truths whose echoes sleep within!
And might we shape one hallow'd dream of Him
Whose life was pure, mysterious, deep, and lone,
Whose glory to the wing-veil'd Seraphim
Beamed from the Cross, more wondrous than His Throne,—
Thought may imagine hours of worldless calm,
When all unwatch'd, Messiah's human soul
Found in far meads a meditative balm,
And in bright flowers some beautiful control.
As God, He made them, and as Man, admired
The blooming product of His lovely power;
And oft may genius, by their grace inspired,
Read silent poems in a sacred flower.
