There is a sheltered nook in a certain garden, where, on a sunny spring morning, the passer-by inhales with startled pleasure the very soul of the 'sweet south,' and, stooping down, far in among brown and crackling leaves, lo the blue hoods of English violets! The fragrance of the violet! What flower scent is like it? Does not the subtle sweetness—half caught, half lost upon the wind—at times sweep over one a vague and thrilling tenderness, an exquisite emotion, partly grief and partly mild delight?

The violet is the poet's darling, perhaps because its frail breath seems to waft from out the delicate blue petals the rare imaginings native to a poet's soul.

May it not be that thus, in the eloquence of perfume, it is but rendering to him who can best respond thereto, a revelation of its inner essences?—showing, to him who can comprehend the sign, a reason why it grows.

Is this too fanciful? Certainly the violet was not made in vain—and in the Eternal Correspondence known to higher intelligences than our own, there surely must exist a grand and beautiful Flower lore, wherein each blossom has an individual word to speak, a lesson to unfold, by form and coloring, and, more than all, by exhaled fragrance.

Doubtless there is a mystery here too deep for us in this gross world to wholly understand; but can we not search after knowledge? Would we not like to grasp an enjoyment less merely of the senses from the geranium's balm and the mayflower's spice?

And notice here how strongly association binds us by the sense of smell—the sense so closely connected with the brain that, through its instrumentality, the mind, it is said, is quickest reached, is soonest moved. So that when perfumes quiver through us, are we oftenest constrained to blush and smile, or shrink and shiver. Perhaps through perfumes also memory knocks the loudest on our heart-doors; until it has come to pass that unto scented handkerchief or withering leaf has been given full power to fire the eye or blanch the cheek; while from secret drawers one starts appalled at flower breaths, stifling, shut up long ago. The sprays themselves might drop unheeded down—dead with the young hopes that laid them there—but the old-time emotion wraps one yet in that undying—ah, how sickening! fragrance.

So in the very nature of the task proposed is couched assistance, since thus to the breath of the flowers does association lend its own interpretation, driving deep the sharpest stings or dropping down the richest consolation through the most humble plants. But is this the end of the matter? Is there not, apart from all that our personal interest may discover, in each flower an unchanging address all its own—an unvaried salutation proffered ever to the world at large? Why is a passion wafted through a nosegay? What purifies the air around a lily? And why are bridal robes rich with orange blooms?

Surely poetry and tradition have but here divined certain truths, omnipotent behind a veil, and recognized their symbols in these chosen blossoms?

But if the flowers are truly types, how should they be interpreted?

There are hints laid in their very structure and outer semblance, hints afforded also by art and romance from time immemorial; and all these, suggestions of the hidden wisdom, must be gathered patiently and wrought out to a fuller clearness, through careful attention to the intuitions of one's own awakened imagination.

But what expression can be found for the soul of a flower—for the evanescent odor that floats upon us only with the dimmest mists of meaning?

In a novel of a few years since, a people dwelling in Mid Africa are described as skilled in the acts of a singular civilization, and especial mention is made of an instrument analogous to an organ, but which evoked perfumes instead of musical sounds. A curious idea, but possibly giving the nearest representation to be made of the effect of odor: by its help, then, by regarding flowers as instruments whose fragrant utterances might be as well conveyed in music, we may be able to translate aright the effluence that stirs beyond the reach of speech.

Let us now try to distinguish, if only for a pleasant pastime, some few favorite strains in those wonderful, unheard melodies with which our gardens ring.

Hear first the roses. The beautiful blush rose, opening fresh and rosy on a dewy June morning, echoes gleefully the birds' 'secret jargoning.'

The saffron tea-rose is an exotic of exotics, and the daintiest of fine ladies bears it in her jewelled fingers to the opera, and there imbues it with the languid ecstasy of an Italian melody. The aroma, floating round those creamy buds, vibrates to the impassioned agony of artistic luxury—to the pleasurable pain that dies away in rippling undulations of the tones.

But the red rose is dyed deep with simpler passion. War notes are hers, but not trumpet tongued, as they pour from out the fiery cactus. No; it is as if a woman's heart thrilled through the red rose to sadden the reveille for country and for God!—an irrepressible undertone of mourning surging over the anguish that must surely come.

Love songs belong, too, to the damask rose, but love still set to martial chords, wrung, as it were, from heroes' wives, in a rapture of patriotic sacrifice.

The white roses are St. Cecilia's, and swell to organ strains; all but that whitest rose, so wan and fragile, which haunts old shady gardens, and never seems to have been there when all things were in their prime, but to have blossomed out of the surrounding decay and fading loveliness. From its bowed head falls drearily upon the ear a low lament over the departed life it would commemorate.

With roses comes the honeysuckle—the real New England one—brimful of nutmeg; and the sweetbriar, piquant with a L'Allegro strain left by Milton. Then the laburnum, which, dripping gold, drips honey likewise, and the locust clusters, and the wistaria, dropping lusciousness.

These are all joy-bells evidently, outbursts of the bliss of nature, but the garb of the wistaria is more sober than her brilliant sisters, whose attire is bright and shining.

There are flowers that seem set to sacred music. Lilies, white and sweet, which, from the Lily of the Annunciation to the lily of the valley, are hallowed by every reverent fancy; for

And the little white verbena, which recalls, in some mystic way, the old Puritan tune, 'Naomi,' whose words of calm submission are so closely interwoven with one's earliest religious faith.

But in contrast to this meek northern saint of a flower, there is a southern flush of oleander bloom, that pours out hymns of mystical devotion, overflowing with the exuberant vitality, glowing with the intense fervor, of the Tropics.

There are flowers, also, the burden of whose odorous airs is sensibly of this world only, earthy, sensuous. Such are the cape jessamine and the narcissus, alike glistening in satin raiment, and alike distilling aromatic essence. Something akin to the waltzes of Strauss, one might fancy, is the music suited to their mood.

And the night-blooming cercus—that uncanny white witch of a creature, with its petals moulded in wax or ivory, its golden-brown leaf-sheathings, and its unequalled emerald (is it a tint, or is it but a shadow?) far down within the lovely cup, with that overpowering voluptuous odor, burdening the atmosphere, permeating the innermost fibres of sensation, steeping the soul in lethargy! What more fit exponent can there be for this weird plant's expression than the song of the serpent-charmer, the singing which can root the feet unto the ground and stay the flowing of the impetuous blood?

But carnations have a wide-awake aspect, which brings one back to every-day life again. Their pleasant pungency is like a bugle note. They seem glad to start the nerves of human beings.

The tulips have taken the sun home to them. Deep down in their hearts you smell it, while you listen to a cheery carol welling up from the comfort warm within.

The pond lilies likewise breathe forth the inspiration of the sun. And they chant in their pure home thanksgivings therefore, happy songs of chaste praise.

These are flowers which look their fragrance; but there are those that startle by the contrast between their outer being and their inner spirit.

What an intoxicating draught the obscure heliotrope offers! One thinks of Heloise in the garments of a nun. The arbutus, also, and the dear daphne-cups, plain, unnoticeable little things, remind one of the nightingales, so insignificant in their appearance, so peerless in their gushes of delicious breath.

The demure Quaker is like the peculiar fragrance of the mignonette. It is hard to believe so many people really like mignonette as profess to do so, it has such a caviare-to-the-general odor. The popular taste here would seem really guided by a fashion of fastidiousness. But the lemon verbena—which, if not a flower, is so high-bred an herb that it deserves to be considered one—one can easily see why that is valued. What a refined, spirituelle smell it has? Hypatia might have worn it, or Lady Jane Grey—or better still, Mrs. Browning's Lady Geraldine might have plucked it in the pauses of the 'woodland singing' the poet tells of.

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.