ness even the leaf of the lily or the
rose. Heaven forbid that we should ever breathe aught but love and
delight in the beauty of these consummate flowers! But feels not the
heart, even when the midsummer morning sunshine is melting the dews on
their fragrant bosoms, that their loveliness is "of the earth
earthy"--faintly tinged or streaked, when at the very fairest, with a
hue foreboding languishment and decay? Not the less for its sake are
those soulless flowers dear to us--thus owning kindred with them whose
beauty is all soul enshrined for a short while on that perishable face.
Do we not still regard the insensate flowers--so emblematical of what,
in human life, we do most passionately love and profoundly pity--with a
pensive emotion, often deepening into melancholy that sometimes, ere the
strong fit subsides, blackens into despair! What pain doubtless was in
the heart of the Elegiac Poet of old, when he sighed over the transitory
beauty of flowers--

"Conquerimur natura brevis quam gratia Florum!"

But over a perfectly pure expanse of night-fallen snow, when unaffected
by the gentle sun, the first fine frost has encrusted it with small
sparkling diamonds, the prevalent emotion is Joy. There is a charm in
the sudden and total disappearance even of the grassy green. All the
"old familiar faces" of nature are for a while out of sight, and out of
mind. That white silence shed by heaven over earth carries with it, far
and wide, the pure peace of another region--almost another life. No
image is there to tell of this restless and noisy world. The
cheerfulness of reality kindles up our reverie ere it becomes a dream;
and we are glad to feel our whole being complexioned by the passionless
repose. If we think at all of human life, it is only of the young, the
fair, and the innocent. "Pure as snow," are words then felt to be most
holy, as the image of some beautiful and beloved being comes and goes
before our eyes--brought from a far distance in this our living world,
or from a distance further still in a world beyond the grave--the image
of virgin growing up sinlessly to womanhood among her parents' prayers,
or of some spiritual creature who expired long ago, and carried with her
her native innocence unstained to heaven.

Such Spiritual Creature--too spiritual long to sojourn below the
skies--wert Thou--whose rising and whose setting--both most
starlike--brightened at once all thy native vale, and at once left it in
d