“A person,” says Mr. Hawtayn, who was a good kind-hearted clergyman of the Church of England, “that can be insensible to the fidelity and love which dumb animals often express, must be lower in nature than they.”
Grata e Natura in noi; fin dalla cuna
Gratitudine è impressa in uman core;
Ma d'un instinto tal questo è lo stile,
Che lo seconda più, chi è piu gentile.2
2 CARLO MARIA MAGGI.
The gentlest natures indeed are the best, and the best will be at the same time the most grateful and the most tender. “Even to behold a flourishing tree, first bereft of bark,” says Dr. Jackson, “then of all the naked branches, yet standing, lastly the green trunk cut down and cast full of sap into the fire, would be an unpleasant spectacle to such as delighted in setting, pruning, or nourishing plants.”
The elder Scaliger as Evelyn tells us, never could convince Erasmus but that trees feel the first stroke of the axe; and Evelyn himself seems to have thought there was more probability in that opinion than he liked to allow. The fall of a very aged oak, he says, giving a crack like thunder, has been often heard at many miles distance; nor do I at any time hear the groans without some emotion and pity, constrained, as I too often am, to fell them with much reluctancy. Mr. Downes in his Letters from the Continent says, “There is at this time a forest near Bolsena so highly venerated for its antiquity that none of the trees are ever cut.”
One who, we are told, has since been honourably distinguished for metaphysical speculation, says in a juvenile letter to the late American Bishop Hobart, “I sometimes converse a considerable time with a tree that in my infancy invited me to play under its cool and refreshing shade; and the old dwelling in which I have spent the greater part of my life, though at present unoccupied and falling into ruin, raises within me such a musing train of ideas, that I know not whether it be pleasing or painful. Now whether it arise from an intimate association of ideas, or from some qualities in the insensible objects themselves to create an affection, I shall not pretend to determine; but certain it is that the love we bear for objects incapable of making a return, seems always more disinterested, and frequently affords us more lasting happiness, than even that which we feel toward rational creatures.”
But never by any author, ancient or modern, in verse or prose, has the feeling which ascribes sentience as well as life to the vegetable world, been more deliciously described than by Walter Landor, when speaking of sweet scents, he says,
They bring me tales of youth, and tones of love;
And 'tis and ever was my wish and way
To let all flowers live freely and all die,
Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart,
Among their kindred in their native place.
I never pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank
And not reproach'd me; the ever sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoil'd, nor lost one grain of gold.
These verses are indeed worthy of their author when he is most worthy of himself. And yet Caroline Bowles's sweet lines will lose nothing by being read after them.
THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.