Every year a 'flower-sermon' is preached in London, in accordance with an admirable custom; and the orator, we may be sure, has no difficulty in 'improving the occasion.' The materials lie rich and ready to his hand. The Laureate, indeed, has asked to what uses we shall put the wildweed flower which simply blows, and has inquired further if there be any moral shut within the bosom of the rose. He was answered long ago by Horace Smith:
'Your voiceless lips, O Flowers! are living preachers,
Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book;'
and a living poetess has assured us, likewise, that flowers will preach to us if we will hear, the rose telling us that all her loveliness is born upon a thorn, and the poppy urging that, though her scarlet head is held in scorn,
'Yet juice of subtle virtues lies
Within my cup of curious dyes.'
There is one lesson which the flowers have been made to teach with rather wearisome iteration. The poets have never been tired of dwelling upon their brief existence and seeing in it a reflection of our own. This rather trite melody has been sounded from the earliest to the latest times. Drummond of Hawthornden draws attention to the flower 'which lingeringly doth fade,' and sees in it a type of his own life, which 'scarce shows now what it hath been.' Herrick, apostrophizing blossoms, deduces from them the fact that all things have their end, though ne'er so brave. 'Fade, flowers, fade!' cries Waller; ''Tis but what we must in our autumn do.' And so Dryden:
'The rose is fragrant, but it fades in time...
Such is your blooming youth, and withering so.'
'Youth's withered flowers' made John Clare sigh to think that in him they would never bloom again.
But this, which may be said to be the orthodox teaching of the flowers, has found many influential questioners, who have dwelt upon the brighter side of the contention. And it is pleasant to listen to their more cheerful voices. 'Not an opening blossom breathes in vain,' wrote Thomson; and the sentiment is heartily corroborated by Mr. Lowell:
'There never yet was flower fair in vain;
Let classic poets rhyme it as they will.'
If the flowers have a short career, they make no complaint of it, says Landor:
'Fast fall the leaves; this never says
To that, "Alas! how brief our days!"
All have alike enjoyed the sun,
And each repeats, "So much is won."'
They enjoy life, and they help to make it enjoyable for others.
'Gay without toil and lovely without art,
They spring to clear the sense and glad the heart.'
So Mrs. Barbauld; while Mrs. Howitt similarly proclaims it to be their business as well as pleasure to minister delight to man, to beautify the earth.
The present Lord Lytton has remarked of flowers that their scent outlives their bloom, and has expressed the aspiration that, in like manner, his mortal hours may 'grow sweeter towards the tomb.' But the main point made by the more optimistic observers of Nature is that, though blossoms fade, they revive again, in equal beauty, by-and-by. 'Ye are to me,' wrote Horace Smith, 'a type of resurrection and second birth.' To W. C. Bryant the delicate flower, arising from the shapeless mould, seemed
'An emanation of the indwelling Life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe.'
Mrs. Hemans--a little unnecessarily, perhaps--dwells upon the fact that though the flowers sleep in dust through the wintry hours, they break forth in glory in the spring. For Longfellow, as for Horace Smith, they are 'emblems of our own great resurrection.' George Morine, in verses little known, reminds us that while cities fall away, and arts flourish and decay, these 'frailer things' will continue to adorn the world 'unchangingly the same.' Though covered for a time by 'the wee white fairies of the snow,' they come back, says Gerald Massey, 'with their fragrant news,' and tell in a thousand hues their dream of beauty. For their annual disappearance from our midst, Thomas Westwood gives a poetical explanation:
'Wearied out with shine and shade,
It rejoiced them, one and all,
To escape from daylight's ken
To their chambers subterrain,
There to rest awhile, and then
Weave them fresh, and weave them fair,
And their fragrant spells prepare.'
Alas! there are those who must needs draw a melancholy moral from the most consolatory phenomena. And so Charlotte Smith, while admitting that
'Another May new buds and flowers shall bring,'
must needs exclaim,
'Ah! why has happiness no second Spring?'
And the dismal reflection finds an echo in the heart of D. M. Moir:
'Green Spring again shall bid
Your boughs with bloom be crown'd;
But alas! to Man,
In earth's brief span,
No second Spring comes round!'
The truth is, the imagination derives from Nature precisely what the former's capacity and quality admit of. As the Laureate said, years ago, any man may find in bud, or blade, or bloom, a meaning suited to his mind. Spenser, pondering on the rose and its thorns, and other such floral combinations, was led to remark that
'Every sweet with sour is tempered still.'
Equally impressed was he by the bounteous ease with which Nature scatters flowers all over the world. In Barry Cornwall's view, this facile profusion is Earth's expression of gratitude for the effulgence of the Sun:
'When on earth he smileth, she bursts forth
In beauty like a bride, and gives him back,
In sweet repayment for his warm bright love,
A world of flowers.'
Beddoes had a quaint and curious fancy that 'when the dead awake or talk in sleep' the flowers 'hear their thoughts, and write them on their leaves, for heaven to look on.' Campbell seems to have loved flowers most for the associations they called up. 'I dote upon you,' he wrote, in an address to them, 'for ye waft me to summers of old;'
'I love you for lulling me back into dreams
Of the blue Highland mountains and echoing streams.'
And we find another Scotchman, William Anderson, giving utterance to a similar expression of feeling.
There is a lesson which the flowers have taught to at least two of our poets, which, though it may have sympathizers, will scarcely find many practical adherents. It is embodied in a little lyric by Mrs. Webster, in which that lady, celebrating the beauty of a solitary blossom, describes how it is seen and gathered, and adds, ironically:
'Why should a flower be fair for its own?
Choose it, pluck it to die.'
But the moral has been pointed even more effectively by the Rev. Gerard Lewis in some excellent verses. 'A gathered flower,' he says, 'is but a fading thing':
'Let woman's beauty wear the sterling gold,
The imperishable gem.
They give to her a brightness manifold,
She adds a charm to them.
'But flowers that strew the earth with fragrant grace,
As stars the welkin fill,
Look loveliest, live the longest, in their place;
To pluck them is to kill.'
That is true, and yet the gathering of flowers will go on. And, after all, what more can a blossom desire than to 'exist beautifully' and exhale its sweetness, whether it lies hidden by the wayside hedge, or decks the bosom of a woman as sweet and beautiful as itself?
[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: Sermons In Flowers