When summer’s delightful season arrives, rarely in this country too warm to be enjoyed throughout the day in the open air, there is nothing more grateful than a profusion of choice flowers around and within our dwellings.  The humblest apartments ornamented with these beautiful productions of nature have, in my view, a more delightful effect than the proudest saloons with gilded ceilings and hangings of Genoa velvet.  The richness of the latter, indeed, would be heightened, and their elegance increased, by the judicious introduction of flowers and foliage into them.  The odour of flowers, the cool appearance of the dark green leaves of some species, and the beautiful tints and varied forms of others, are singularly grateful to the sight, and refreshing at the same time.  Vases of Etruscan mould, containing plants of the commonest kind, offer those lines of beauty which the eye delights in following; and variform leaves hanging festooned over them, and shading them if they be of a light colour, with a soft grateful hue, add much to their pleasing effect.  These decorations are simple and cheap.

Lord Bacon, whose magnificence of mind exempts him from every objection as a model for the rest of mankind, (in all but the unfortunate error to which, perhaps, his sordid pursuit in life led him, to the degradation of his nobler intellect), was enthusiastically attached to flowers, and kept a succession of them about him in his study and at his table.  Now the union of books and flowers is more particularly agreeable.  Nothing, in my view, is half so delightful as a library set off with these beautiful productions of the earth during summer, or indeed, any other season of the year.  A library or study, opening on green turf, and having the view of a distant rugged country, with a peep at the ocean between hills, a small fertile space forming the nearest ground, and an easy chair and books, is just as much of local enjoyment as a thinking man can desire—­I reck not if under a thatched or slated roof, to me it is the same thing.  A favourite author on my table, in the midst of my bouquets, and I speedily forget how the rest of the world wags.  I fancy I am enjoying nature and art together, a consummation of luxury that never palls upon the appetite—­a dessert of uncloying sweets.

Madame Roland seems to have felt very strongly the union of mental pleasure with that afforded to the senses by flowers.  She somewhere says, “La vue d’une fleur carresse mon imagination et flatte mes sens a un point inexprimable; elle reveille avec volupte le sentiment de mon existence.  Sous le tranquil abri du toit paternel, j’etois heureuse des enfance avec des fleurs et des livres; dans l’etroite enciente d’une prison, au milieu des fers imposes par la tyrannie la plus revoltante, j’oublie l’injustice des hommes, leurs sottises, et mes maux, avec des livres et des fleurs.”  These pleasures, however, are too simple to be universally felt.