Fleeting as the flowers are in fact, they live forever in fancy.

For they constitute one of the commonest motifs of both painting and poetry.

A branch just breaking into bloom seen against the sunrise sky, or a bough bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream, is subject enough for their greatest masters, who thus wed, as it were, two arts in one,--the spirit of poesy with pictorial form.

This plum-tree is but a blossom.

Precocious harbinger of a host of flowers, its gay heralding over, it vanishes not to be recalled, for it bears no edible fruit.
The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal.