They enjoy life, and they help to make it enjoyable for others.
'Gay without toil and lovely without art, They spring to clear the sense and glad the heart.'
So Mrs. Barbauld; while Mrs. Howitt similarly proclaims it to be their business as well as pleasure to minister delight to man, to beautify the earth.
The present Lord Lytton has remarked of flowers that their scent outlives their bloom, and has expressed the aspiration that, in like manner, his mortal hours may 'grow sweeter towards the tomb.' But the main point made by the more optimistic observers of Nature is that, though blossoms fade, they revive again, in equal beauty, by-and-by. 'Ye are to me,' wrote Horace Smith, 'a type of resurrection and second birth.' To W. C. Bryant the delicate flower, arising from the shapeless mould, seemed
'An emanation of the indwelling Life, A visible token of the upholding Love, That are the soul of this wide universe.'
Mrs. Hemans--a little unnecessarily, perhaps--dwells upon the fact that though the flowers sleep in dust through the wintry hours, they break forth in glory in the spring. For Longfellow, as for Horace Smith, they are 'emblems of our own great resurrection.' George Morine, in verses little known, reminds us that while cities fall away, and arts flourish and decay, these 'frailer things' will continue to adorn the world 'unchangingly the same.' Though covered for a time by 'the wee white fairies of the snow,' they come back, says Gerald Massey, 'with their fragrant news,' and tell in a thousand hues their dream of beauty. For their annual disappearance from our midst, Thomas Westwood gives a poetical explanation:
'Wearied out with shine and shade, It rejoiced them, one and all, To escape from daylight's ken To their chambers subterrain, There to rest awhile, and then Weave them fresh, and weave them fair, And their fragrant spells prepare.'
Alas! there are those who must needs draw a melancholy moral from the most consolatory phenomena. And so Charlotte Smith, while admitting that
'Another May new buds and flowers shall bring,'
'Ah! why has happiness no second Spring?'
And the dismal reflection finds an echo in the heart of D. M. Moir:
'Green Spring again shall bid Your boughs with bloom be crown'd; But alas! to Man, In earth's brief span, No second Spring comes round!'