Excerpt from Among Flowers and Trees With the Poets or the Plant Kingdom in Verse: A Practical Cyclopaedia for Lovers of Flowers Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visi ble world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth than for tillage and roads; that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. In this age of science let it be remembered that the objects of nature may be viewed in a poetic aspect as well as in a scientific. Asters, willows, butterflies and sparrows serve just as high a pur pose when we think oi them as symbols as when we study them analytically. Roses exist as much for the purpose of suggesting love, sweetness, youth, and purity as for the study of calyx and petals and stamens. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.