Canadian Wild Flowers eBook

Bring her flowers—­sweet, beautiful flowers.  They are meet companions for her solitude.  Gather blossoms from the whitening apple-bough, violets from the meadow, dandelions from the wayside.  She will fold them more tenderly to her bosom than the rarest plants, for their faces are old, familiar ones, and she imagines they wear a look of pity.

But there are more precious things than human sympathy; there are sweeter flowers than violets or roses.  They bloom on the prayer-consecrated mountains of Judea, amid the ancient olives of Gethsemane, along the Dolorous Way trodden by the Man of Sorrows, beneath the shadows of the Cross, and around the borrowed Sepulchre.  Oh, gather them with no sparing hand:  there are enough for you and her—­enough for every sorrowing heart in the universe.  Take them to the poor sufferer.  Their fragrance will make the lonely chamber like a garden of spices; the tearful eyes will turn heavenward, and the pale lips—­tremulous with contrition will whisper, “Father; forgive me, for I knew not what I did when I murmured at thy dealings.”  Then a solemn hush will follow—­a holy twilight of the soul,—­as if the sorrows of earth were blending with the joys of heaven, the pains of mortality with the blessedness of the angelic bards.  Oh, these are the flowers for a sickroom!  How dreary and desolate does it seem without them!  The strong and healthy may live on, careless and irreligious, but what would become of the poor, grief-stricken, despairing Soul if she could not repose quietly in the bosom her Beloved, and say with child-like simplicity, morning and evening, "Our Father who art in heaven!"

SONGS OF HOPE

“HE GIVETH SONGS IN THE NIGHT.”

Gloriously the sun sinks behind the western hills.  Half the sky seems on fire, and the other half wreathed with light fantastic clouds.  All nature is beautiful—­can I be sad?  Nay; away with sadness, away with sorrow; I will forget everything my strangeness, my blasted hopes, and seek for happiness where happiness only is to be found, in the sacred Oracles of God.—­July 14, 1852.

  God sometimes speaks in earthquake and in storm,
  But oftener in the “still small voice” of love: 
  He urges men as loving fathers plead. 
  God is our Father, yet we shun his face
  And hide ourselves when at the cool of day
  He walketh in the garden!

How sweet the thought that God, our heavenly Father, is omniscient.  Our griefs are not hidden from him.  He knows our hearts, and with all this knowledge he is good—­so tender, so pitiful!  Oh, to love him as he deserves!  Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing his praises!  Tell the sick, tell the sorrowing, tell the broken-hearted of this God; tell the wretched, the guilty, the wayward prodigal of this gracious Father.

THE LAST GOOD NIGHT.