What the Flowers Teach

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.