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.”