GOD has written his name of power upon the blue heavens in characters of flame; but he has written his better name of love upon the green earth, and the characters are flowers. Yes, flowers, bright flowers, are a revelation from God: all eyes can see and all hearts understand the glad Gospel they bring to man. Why were they formed, if not to give delight? Must not the Designer, then, of this delight be a being of goodness--a being of love?

      Welcome, then, ye sweet children of the sun and dew! welcome ye denizens of gardens, ye glowing roses, pure lilies, proud dahlias, queenly camelias, and ye sweet, modest violets, redolent of perfume! and welcome thou majestic flower of the sun, that liftest thy head above thy fellows in regal pride! and welcome, too, ye wild flowers--sweet forest nurslings--for though you came timidly forth in your sequestered nooks, your fragrant breath has been your harbinger, and told the glad story that winter is past, and that spring-time, the glad season of songs and flowers, has come!

      Flowers spring from the earth: yet how unlike the dark clod which gave them birth! They seem to our eyes like sinless children in a world of sin. How delicate their structure! how rich and varied their holyday garb, excelling that of Solomon in all his glory! how silently and yet how surely do they perform their joy-giving mission! and what a hopeful lesson do they teach as they sadly depart!

      Their language, too, is a universal one; pride and sin have never caused among them a confusion of tongues, and they have but one sweet speech in every clime. Untaught infancy understands their silent yet eloquent appeal; and childhood finds a welcome book in the daisied meadow and the flower-strewn bank of the murmuring stream. Yes, wherever the modest violet blooms, the daisy turns a heavenward eye, or the small woodland flowers peep forth, there does the earnest eye of the child read a lesson, whose moral will last even when the eye grows dim, and the grave seems not a terror but a rest.

      Flowers are inseparably linked with youth's brightest dream; and what maiden's heart ever failed to interpret the language of the rose, be it bud or flower, telling, with a blush, of the spotless purity of first affection. Our affections are holy things, and flowers should ever be cherished as the symbols of feelings and emotions for which the tongue often fails to find adequate utterance. And think not here, that we have departed from salutary truth; for the flowery symbol and the heart's emotion have, in the all-wise One, a common origin.

      Have you ever seen the bride at the altar, and marked the white roses, as fair and pure as herself, wreathing her young brow, or gleaming like stars in the midnight of her raven hair, and not felt that flowers have a voice? Or have you beheld them strewn in the coffin of infant loveliness, as fair and fragile as their own fading leaves, without feeling that theirs was a language of deep significance?

      But flowers have other and more solemn voices. Though beautiful, their beauty is of short duration. The morning beholds them impearled with dewdrops--their loveliness the delight of every eye, the theme of every tongue. Visit them at eve--they are withered, and faded, and dead. Their story is that of mortals--of human flowers. Our lives are like the grass, or the flowers of the grass: in life's morning how bright, yet how transitory! The evening of age draws on apace, the bloom of manhood fades, and like the withered flower we sink into the dust. But flowers have another voice--a voice of joy--a voice of triumph. At the breath of spring they burst from the fetters in which winter had bound them, and wake again to new life and beauty; and they tell thee, O man, that the winter of the grave shall not last forever--they shadow forth the glories of the resurrection morn, and tell of unfading and immortal youth in an Eden where bloom unwithering flowers.

[The Ladies' Repository 10 (April 1850): 134.]

      William Baxter's "Short Sermons from the Poets: Number VII" was first published in The Ladies' Repository: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature and Religion, Vol. 10, No. 4, April 1850, p. 134. This volume, edited by B. F. Tefft, was published in Cincinnati by L. Swormstedt and J. H. Power and in New York by G. Lane and L. Scott.

      Addenda and corrigenda are earnestly solicited.

Ernie Stefanik
Derry, PA

Created 15 April 2000.
Updated 28 June 2003.