from the errors, the failings, the vices of men,—at least, it is well they should be such, that the first suggestion of their names, the first aspect of their mausoleums should associate itself with something that is honorable, agreeable or praiseworthy, in the history of mankind. But there, where the first promptings of an ambition, commendable if it had been generous, dawned upon his youthful mind,-there, where, after the lapse of more than three quarters of a century, his somewhat frivolous old age submitted to the “inevitable hour,"-let him, who desires to honor the memory of Hastings, bend over his tomb, in silence and alone, amidst the solitary obscurity of the chancel of Daylesford.

ADDRESS

BEFORE THE

MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY

ON THE

DEDICATION OF HORTICULTURAL HALL, BOSTON,

MAY 15, 1845.

MR. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE SOCIETY:—

Ir is a touching, and to some of you, perhaps, familiar incident, which is related of a celebrated English traveller,* whose genius and misfortunes have long closely allied him with every human sympathy. He had penetrated the interior solitudes of Africa, in pursuance of his first adventurous researches into that distant and mysterious land. He was in the midst of the vast deserts of a barbarous clime, hundreds of miles away from the very outskirts of civilization, and surrounded on every side by the beasts of the wilderness, and by men scarcely less ferocious. He had suffered every privation and every ill. He was alone in the dismal waste, with a worn and failing body and a sinking mind. It was while

* Park.

the chance of life appeared a thing almost too hopeless for conjecture, and a thousand natural emotions thronged upon his soul; while the present seemed to crowd into its narrow hour the accumulated memories of all the past, and offered him but the prospect of a miserable death upon the barren sands, for the home which he had left with such eager and buoyant expectations, and the loved and lovely things he might behold no more-it was at this moment of despondenсу and distress, that an object caught his eye, which, perhaps, from the heedless or the happy, would scarcely have attracted a passing glance. It was a small moss, of extraordinary beauty, in the process of germination; and, as he contemplated the delicate conformation of its roots and leaves, the thought forced itself irresistibly upon his mind, that the same bountiful and eternal Providence, which protected. this minute but lovely object in obscurity so complete, and in the region of perpetual barrenness, could not be unmindful of one of his intelligent beings, the highest in the scale of natural creation, for whose use and benefit the system of visible nature was itself ordained. It was the reflection thus suggested which banished his despair, and nerved his heart to those renewed efforts, which secured his eventual return to his native land.

There could be no more striking illustration than this, of the benevolent order of the universe; which

so often vindicates itself under circumstances apparently fortuitous, by demonstrating the purpose and value of those things, whose utility a cold philosophy had endeavored to discover in vain. It were, indeed, too much to say, that the minutest atom which floats in infinite space, or the meanest flower that blows upon the bosom of nature, has been created for no valuable end. If the purposes of existence were less than they really are, in the eye of reason and enlightened philosophy, we might have been subjected to a very different constitution of outward things. To surround us merely with those objects, which might minister to our actual necessities, were to deprive our senses themselves of their very noblest attributes, and to contract within the narrowest limits the circle of our capacities and desires. Take from us, indeed, those lovely manifestations of external beauty; those sweet, and graceful and glorious creations, which tend much more, perhaps, to the promotion of our present happiness, as well as to the perfection of our immortal destiny, than all which the world counts most worthy of its pursuit,-and our minds were dark, and our hearts dead within us, instead of kindling with the glowing earth, as, radiant with brightness and beauty, she smiles to meet the embraces of the returning Spring.

The very savage, indeed, must derive some moral elevation from the contemplation of external nature.

For his untutored soul, as well as for the mind of the most cultivated student of the works of creation, that orient pavilion, flushed with a thousand gorgeous and shifting hues, from whose refulgent portals issue the outgoings of the morning; the deepening loveliness of that softer heaven, which ushers universal nature to repose; the changing year, as its advancing seasons ripen into mellower beauty;-yes, all and each, within the rudest recesses of the primeval wilderness, as well as amidst the refinements of a more polished condition of life, in their turn have given wing to a sublimer imagination, have widened the sphere of intellectual exertion, and dignified the reflections and aspirations of the moral being. The Indian maiden, who decks her jetty tresses with the wild flowers plucked by the margin of the forest brook, drinks in from them the same images of grace, fragility and beauty, which they are fitted to inspire in the proudest bosom that beats in regal halls; where every silken tint that art has curiously embroidered, and every radiant gleam that glitters from clustered gems, were incomplete without these simpler charms, furnished by the cheap provision of nature, yet more resplendent in their freshness, than the array of Solomon in all his glory!

But if such be the universal influence of natural beauty; if over even the soul of a barbarian it exerts this inborn power to charm the imagination and elevate the mind; surely, amidst the hourly cares, which