either in its general outline, form, or color, or in some lesser details. Look at the chair on which your friend is sitting, at the carpet beneath your feet, at the paper on the walls, at the curtains which shut out the wintry landscape, at the table near you, at the clock, the candlesticks, nay, the very fire-irons—or it may be the iron mouldings upon your stove—at the picture-frames, the book-case, the table-covers, the work-box, the inkstand, in short, at all the trifling knick-knacks in the room, and on all these you may see, in bolder or fainter lines, a thousand proofs of the debt we owe to the vegetable world, not only for so many of the fabrics themselves, but also for the beautiful forms, and colors, and ornaments we seek to imitate. Branches and stems, leaves and tendrils, flowers and fruits, nuts and berries, are everywhere the models.
As for our clothing, in coloring as in its designs, it is a studied reflection of the flowers, and fruits, and foliage; nay, even the bark, and wood, and the decayed leaves are imitated; feuille morte was a very fashionable color in Paris, once upon a time. Madame Cottin, the authoress of the Exiles of Siberia, had a “feuille morte” dress, which figured in some book or other, thirty or forty years ago. The patterns with which our dresses and shawls are stamped or woven, whether from the looms of France, Italy, or Persia, are almost wholly taken from the fields and gardens. Our embroidery, whether on lace, or muslin, or silk, whether it be the work of a Parisian, a Swiss, a Bengalee, or a Chinese, bears witness to the same fact. Our jewelry shows the same impression. In short, the richest materials and the cheapest, the lightest and the heaviest, are alike covered with blossoms, or vines, or leaves, in ten thousand varied combinations.
