Far away beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the sleepers.
But mighty Nature bounds as from her birth;
The sun is in the heavens, and life on earth:
Flowers in the valley, splendor in the beam,
Health on the gale, and freshness in the stream.
But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, it's bloom is shed; Or, like the snow-fall in the river, A moment white, then melts forever.
William Henry Flower the Anglican too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and superstition'.
Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; tossing tumultuously under vast suns of jade green and balas-ruby orange; swaying and weltering in rich twilights, in aurora-curtained nights, they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music.
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful.