trembles when the breeze goes by, and seems an emblem of innocence and grace. And there the bright-flowered lotus with its pealike bloom, in social union glows as burnished gold, animating and gilding with its lustre all the tribes that spring near it; and fifty others, too, we note, which, though common and disregarded by reason of our familiarity with them, or expelled from favor by the novelty of far-fetched fair ones, deserve more attention than we are disposed to afford them. There are few plants which we look upon with more perfect contempt than that common product of every soil, the ‘dandelion.’[30] Every child knows it, and the little village groups which perambulate the hedges for the first offspring of the year, amuse themselves by hanging circlets of its stalks linked like a chain round their necks: yet if we examine this in all the stages of its growth, we shall pronounce it a beautiful production; and its blossom, though often a solitary one, is perhaps the very first that enlivens the sunny bank of the hedge in the opening year, peeping out from withered leaves, dry stalks, and desolation, as a herald, telling us that nature is not dead, but reposing, and will awaken to life again. And some of us, perhaps, can remember the pleasure it afforded us in early days, when we first noticed its golden blossoms under the southern shelter of the cottage hedge, thinking that the ‘winter was past,’ and that ‘the time of the singing of birds was come;’ and yet, possibly, when seen, it may renew some of that childish delight, though the fervor of expectation is cooled by experience and time. The form of this flower, with its ligulate petals many times doubled is elegant and perfect; the brightness and liveliness of the yellow, like the warm rays of an evening sun, are not exceeded in any blossom, native or foreign, that I know of; and this, having faded away, is succeeded by a head of down, which loosened from its receptacle, and floating in the breeze, comes sailing calmly along before us, freighted with a seed at its base; but so accurately adjusted is its buoyant power to the burden it bears, that steadily passing on its way, it rests at last in some cleft or cranny in the earth, preparatory to its period of germination, appearing more like a flight of animated creatures than the seed of a plant. This is a very beautiful appointment! but so common an event as hardly to be noticed by us; yet it accomplishes effectually the designs of nature, and plants the species at distances and in places that no other contrivance could so easily and fitly effect. The seeds, it is true, might have fallen and germinated around the parent plant, but this was not the purpose of nature; yet may seem to some a very unnecessary contrivance for the propagation of a common dandelion, whose benefits to mankind as a medicine, though retained in our pharmacopœias, and occasionally resorted to, seem of no great importance. Nor are we