Lord Bacon has a beautiful passage about flowers. As to
Shakspeare, he is a perfect Alpine valley - he is full of flowers; they
spring, and blossom, and wave in every cleft of his mind. Witness the
Midsummer Night's Dream. Even Milton, cold, serene, and stately as he
is, breaks forth into exquisite gushes of tenderness and fancy when he
marshals the flowers, as in Lycidas and Comus.
But all this while the sun has been withering the flowers the guide
brought me; how they look! blue and white Canterbury bells, harebells,
clochettes, all bedraggled and wilted, like a young lady who has been
up all night at a ball.
"No, no," say I to the guide; "don't pick me any more. I don't want
them. The fact is, if they are pretty I cannot help it. I must even
take it out in looking as I go by."
One thing is evident; He who made the world is no utilitarian, no
despiser of the fine arts, and no condemner of ornament; and those
religionists, who seek to restrain every thing within the limits of
cold, bare utility, do not imitate our Father in heaven.
Cannot a bonnet cover your head, without the ribbon and the flowers,
say they? Yes; and could not a peach tree bear peaches without a
blossom? What a waste is all this colored corolla of flowers, as if
the seed could not mature without them! God could have created the
fruit in good, strong, homely bushel baskets, if he had been so
disposed.
"Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity," says a good man, when he
sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the
Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament?
There is not a fly's leg, nor an insect's wing, which is not polished
and decorated to an extent that we should think positive extravagance
in finishing up a child's dress. And can we suppose that this Being
can take delight in dwellings and modes of life or forms of worship
where every thing is reduced to cold, naked utility? I think not. The
instinct to adorn and beautify is from him; it likens us to him, and
if rightly understood, instead of being a siren to beguile our hearts
away, it will be the closest affiliating band.
If this power of producing the beautiful has been always so
fascinating that the human race for its sake have bowed down at the
feet even of men deficient in moral worth, if we cannot forbear loving
the painter, poet, and sculptor, how much more shall we love God, who,
with all goodness, has also all beauty!
But all this while we have been riding on till we have passed the
meadows, and the fields, and are coming into the dark and awful pass
of the Tete Noir, which C. has described to you.
