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Preface (ANOTHER bouquet Yes there)

ANOTHER bouquet! Yes, there are four seasons at least in the year, and from the proper flowery point of view as many seasons as days, nay, as hours; for Nature rests not, and every moment witnesses a new creation of life and beauty. We must have another bouquet, and again perhaps another! And if we stay our course in the Fifth Series it will be because our hands are weary, not because the garden is exhausted; for we have but made a beginning even now in collecting the emblems of blessedness with which we are engirt. The commonness of the subjects figured and discoursed upon in these pages will commend them more forcibly to discreet souls than would any possible rarity and remoteness. The blue sky and the green earth cannot be monopolised; they mix with our breath and blood and every-day thoughts, and the poorest take their share from the same exhaustless fountains as the wealthy. We will not, indeed, speak disdainfully of the curiosities Queen Flora keeps in her cabinet; but we claim for our "familiar" flowers that their true value is to be found in their plentifulness, accessibility, and close association with our customs, pastimes, and the whole of our daily life, in all which the rarities from far-off lands have no part, and, therefore, touch no homely feeling or tender sentiment. "Sweet is all the land about and all the flowers that blow. And the story of their sweetness is chiefly what concerns us here.