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WILLIAM COWPER.

IT is with flowers as with moral qualities- the bright are sometimes poisonous, but, I believe, never the sweet.

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What plant we in this apple-tree?
Buds, which the breath of summer days
Shall lengthen into leafy sprays;

Boughs where the thrush with crimson breast
Shall haunt, and sing, and hide her nest;
We plant, upon the sunny lea,

A shadow for the noontide hour,
A shelter from the summer shower,
When we plant the apple-tree.

What plant we in this apple-tree?
Sweets for a hundred flowery springs
To load the May-wind's restless wings,
When, from the orchard row, he pours
Its fragrance through our open doors;

That fan the blue September sky,

While children come, with cries of glee,
And seek them where the fragrant grass
Betrays their bed to those who pass,
At the foot of the apple-tree.

And when, above this apple-tree,
The winter stars are quivering bright,
And winds go howling through the night,
Girls, whose young eyes o'erflow with mirth,
Shall peel its fruit by cottage hearth,

And guests in prouder homes shall see,
Heaped with the grape of Cintra's vine
And golden orange of the Line,
The fruit of the apple-tree.

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THE sense of beauty in Nature, even among cultured people, is less often met with than other mental endowments.

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UTHER always kept a flower in a glass on his writing-table; and when he was waging his great public controversy with Eckins he kept a flower in his hand. Lord Bacon has a beautiful passage about flowers. As to Shakespeare, he is a perfect Alpine valley-he is full of flowers; they spring, and blossom, and wave in every cleft of his mind. Even Milton, cold, serene, and stately as he is, breaks forth into exquisite gushes of tenderness and fancy when he marshals the flowers.

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