Nature is very liberal in all things; and we have coarse and disagreeable flower odors, supplied by peonies, marigolds, the gay bouvardia, and a still more odious greenhouse flower—a yellowish, toadlike thing, which those who have once known will never forget, and for which perhaps they can supply a name. If odor be the flower's expression of its soul, what rude and evil tenants must dwell within those luckless mansions!
But if a flower's soul speaks through odor, what of scentless blossoms? Are they dumb or dead? Some may be too young to speak—as the infantile anemones, daisies, and innocents.
Perhaps some are thus most meet for symbols of the dead; the stately, frozen calla, which seems a fit trophy, bound with laurel leaves, to lay upon a soldier's bier; and the snow-cold camelia, whose stony sculpturing is the very emblem for those white features whence God has drained away the life.
But, camelias warmed with color, fuchsias, abutilons, the cultivated azalia (the wild one has a scent), asters, and a host of other loved and lovely flowers—why are they deprived of language?
Perhaps they have a fragrance, felt by subtler senses than we mortals own. But, at least, if they must now appear as mute, we may yet hope that in a more spiritual existence we shall behold their very doubles, gifted with a novel charm, a captivating perfume, we cannot conceive of here. For in the vast harmony of the universe one cannot believe there can be any floral instruments whose strings are never to be awakened.
It has been but the pastime of a half hour that we have given to the flower odors, when an ever-widening field for speculation lies before us. But imagination droops exhausted, baffled by the innumerable enchanting riddles still to solve. And this must now suffice.
If it serve to excite any dormant thought in the more ingenious mind of another—if it be able to call out the learned conceits of some scholar, or the delicate symbolisms of some dreamer, it has done its work.
The hand that has thus far guided the pen, to dally with a subject all the dearer because so generally disregarded, will now gladly yield it to the control of a fresher fancy, a truer observation.