There is meaning in the flowers,
Breathing influences
Sweeter than the odor-showers
That o'erflood the senses.
They are ministers of Wisdom,
Glory-winged angels,
Who will teach us, ifwe list them,
Beautiful evangels.
In the stillness, in the shadow,
In the pathless by-ways,
Glorifying all the meadow,
Glad as in the highways ;
Down among the hazles nestled,
Hidden close together,
On the hill-top where they wrestled
With the windy weather:
Dancing with the dancing twinkles
On the brooklet's edges,
Where the humming water wrinkles
Round the hissing sedges ;
Or, amid morass and dingle,
Careless of their loneness,
With the humblest herbs they mingle,
Royal-born, though throneless ;
Ever doing their sweet duty
In their many places,—
Beautiful for love of beauty,
Not for human praises.
To the sun's kiss, and the breezes',
Giving blush and sweetness
With a grace that only ceases
At their life's completeness.
On their bosoms if we trample,—
Sweeter for the crushing,-
With forgiveness, true and ample,
All their hearts are gushing.
Fealty in their lives they teach us
To be calm and firmer,
And if earthlings over-reach us
Never once to murmur;
But beneath the weedy rankness
Of the vile, bloom humbly,
Knowing virtue is not thankless
Though the proud pass dumbly.
Then, at last, so meekly dying,
Going home through brownness,
Like a queen of beauty lying
On her death-bed, crownless;-
Not a low breath of repining
For the bloom they are leaving,
Since their very shrouds are twining
Life-germs in the' weaving!
So they live and perish, never
Wasting any treasure;
For they live in us forever
To their fullest measure.
If like them we make our growing
Sweetly to delight all,
And our bloomed hopes deathward going,
Seed-husks of the vital.
What the Flowers Teach