There is a fitness in such imagery; for flowers seem to serve naturally as emblems of human emotions. Who has not felt the pathos of a faded blossom kept as a memorial of the past? Many years ago I was given a beautifully bound copy of Moxon's edition of _Shelley_; and when I noticed that opposite that loveliest of poems, "Epipsychidion," were a few pink petals interleaved, I was sure that their presence at such a page was not merely accidental; and it has since been a whim of mine that those tokens of some bygone incident in the life of a former owner of the book should not be displaced. There are vicissitudes in human lives with which flowers become associated in our thoughts. I recall a calm autumn day spent in company with a friend upon the Surrey Downs, when the marjoram and other fragrant flowers of the chalk were still as beautiful as in summer, but the sadness of a near departure from that familiar district lay heavy on my mind; and that day proved indeed to be the end of many happy years, for long afterwards, when I returned to those hills, all was changed for _me_, though Nature was kindly as before. Thus a date, not greatly heeded at the time, may be found to have marked one of life's turning-points, and the flowers connected with it may hold a peculiar significance in memory. It is a sad moment for a flower-lover when he sees before him "the last rose of summer" ("rose" is a term which may here be used in a general sense for any sweet and pleasing flower), and realizes that he is now face to face with the season's euthanasia, "that last brief resurrection of summer in its most brilliant memorials, a resurrection that has no root in the past, nor steady hold upon the future, like the lambent and fitful gleams from an expiring lamp." Yet so gradual is this change, and the resurrection of which De Quincey speaks so entrancing, that one is comforted even while he grieves. For example, there are few sights more cheering on a late September day than to find by some bare tidal river a colony of the marsh-mallow. The most admired member of the family is usually the muskmallow; and certainly it is a very pretty flower, with its bright foliage and the pink satiny sheen of its corolla; but far more charming, though less showy in appearance, is its modest sister of the salt marshes, whose leaves, overspread with hoary down, are soft as softest velvet, and her petals steeped in as tender and delicate a tint of palest rose-colour as could be imagined in dreams. There is something especially gracious about this _althaea_, or "healer"; and her virtues are not more soothing to body than to mind.