"Methinks the flowers Have spirits far more beautiful than ours."--_Withers._ The gentle hearts of the old poets clung to the flowers with a fond affection; in their eyes they were sweet messengers, bearing meanings and thoughts "too deep for tears," ever hinting of love which dieth not, but liveth on for ever in another state of existence. They traced in the flowers fanciful resemblances of fond passions--likenesses of what they loved and cherished all the more since the original forms which they fancied the flowers resembled were transplanted into the gardens of heaven. We who sojourned during the whole of that summer in the very heart of the district which suffered the most severely during that calamitous visitation, almost unconsciously gathered materials for one of those gloomy pictures which so few living witnesses survive to paint, and which we hope may never again darken our pages. We seem like those who, having escaped some perilous shipwreck, sit shuddering on the rock on which they have been thrown, their faces buried in their hands, yet unable to shut out the appalling spectacle they beheld, even after it passed away. Fancy still calls up the phantoms, amid the white foam and the tumbling waves, as they float by, with pale faces, uplifted and beseeching hands; youth and beauty with her long hair unbound, and crisped with the boiling spray, while manly vigour buffets in vain with the billows, until darkness and destruction sweep over all; and we, like the mournful messenger in Job, "only escaped alone to tell thee." The Land of Death in which we dwelt was Newington, hemmed in by Lambeth, Southwark, Bermondsey, and other gloomy parishes through which the pestilence stalked like a Destroying Angel in the deep shadows of the night and the open noon of day, while in every street "There was nought but mourning weeds, And sorrow and dismay; Where burial met with burial still, And jostled by the way."--_Hogg._