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