And in this vein, we can not avoid noting and commending the increasing love for flowers. Bouquets are marketable; they are getting upon the stalls; they flank the lamb and the butter. Our civilization is ripening into a sense of their uses and beauties. They talk to us even now--(for a tenpenny bunch of roses is smiling at us from our desk) of fields, fragrance, health, and wanton youth. They take us back to the days when with urchin fingers we grappled the butter-cup and the mountain daisy--days when we loitered by violet banks, and loved to loiter--days when we loved the violets, and loved to love; and they take us forward too--far forward to the days that always seem coming, when flowers shall bless us again, and be plucked again, and be loved again, and bloom around us, year after year; and bloom over us, year after year! * * * * * The two great hinges of public chat are--just now--the rival candidates, Generals Pierce and Scott; serving not only for the hot hours of lunch under the arches of the Merchants' Exchange, but toning the talk upon every up-bound steamer of the Hudson, and giving their creak to the breezes of Cape May. Poor Generals!--that a long and a worthy life should come to such poor end as this. To be vilified in the journals, to be calumniated with dinner-table abuse, or with worse flattery--to have their religion, their morals, their courage, their temper, all brought to the question;--to have their faces fly-specked in every hot shop of a barber--to have their grandparents, and parents all served up in their old clothes; to have their school-boy pranks ferreted out, and every forgotten penny pitched into their eyes; to have their wine measured by the glass, and their tears by the tumbler; to have their names a bye-word, and their politics a reproach--this is the honor we show to these most worthy candidates! * * * * * As a relief to the wearisome political chat, our city has just now been blessed with Alboni; and it is not a little curious to observe how those critics who were coy of running riot about Jenny Lind, are lavishing their pent-up superlatives upon the new-comer. The odium of praising nothing, it appears, they do not desire; and seize the first opportunity to win a reputation for generosity. The truth is, we suspect, that Alboni is a highly cultivated singer, with a voice of southern sweetness, and with an air of most tempered pleasantness; but she hardly brings the _prestige_ of that wide benevolence, noble action, and _naïve_ courtesy, which made the world welcome Jenny as a woman, before she had risked a note.