le of all countries, who
speak our mother tongue, love to give an inalienable English name--
The Hollyhock. It is one of the flowers of the people, which the
pedantic Latinists have left untouched in homely Saxon, because the
people would have none of their long-winded and heartless
appellations. Having dwelt briefly upon the honor that Divine
Providence confers upon human genius and labor, in letting them
impress their finger-marks so distinctly upon the features and
functions of the earth, and upon the forms of animal life, it may be
a profitable recurrence to the same line of thought to notice what
that same genius and labor have wrought upon the structure and face
of this familiar flower. What was it at first? What is it now in
the rural gardens of New England? A shallow, bell-mouthed cup, in
most cases purely white, and hung to a tall, coarse stalk, like the
yellow jets of a mullein. That is its natural and distinctive
characteristic in all countries; at least where it is best known and
most common. What is it here, bearing the fingerprints of man's
mind and taste upon it? Its white and thin-sided cup is brim full
and running over with flowery exuberance of leaf and tint infinitely
variegated. Here it is as solid, as globe-faced, and nearly as
large as the dahlia. Place it side by side with the old, single-
leafed hollyhock, in a New England farmer's garden, and his wife
would not be able to trace any family relationship between them,
even through the spectacles with which she reads the Bible. But the
dahlia itself--what was that in its first estate, in the country in
which it was first found in its aboriginal structure and complexion?
As plain and unpretending as the hollyhock; as thinly dressed as the
short-kirtled daisy in a Connecticut meadow. It is wonderful, and
passing wonder, how teachable and quick of perception and prehension
is Nature in the studio of Art. She, the oldest of painters, that
hung the earth, sea, and sky of the antediluvian world with
landscapes, waterscapes, and cloudscapes manifold and beautiful,
when as yet the human hand had never lifted a pencil to imitate her
skill; she, with the colors wherewith she dyed the fleecy clouds
that spread their purple drapery over the first sunset, and in which
she dipped the first rainbow hung in heaven, and the first rose that
breathed and blushed on earth; she that has embellished every day,
since the Sun first opened its eye upon the worl