The Angel of the Flowers one day,Beneath a rose tree sleeping lay,The spirit to whom charge is givenTo bathe young buds in dews of heaven,Awaking from his light reposeThe Angel whispered to the Rose"O fondest object of my careStill fairest found where all is fair,For the sweet shade thou givest to meAsk what thou wilt 'tis granted thee""Then" said the Rose, "with deepened glowOn me another grace bestow."The spirit paused in silent thoughtWhat grace was there the flower had not?'Twas but a moment--o'er the roseA veil of moss the Angel throws,And robed in Nature's simple weed,Could there a flower that rose exceed?
Madame de Genlis tells us that during her first visit to England she saw a moss-rose for the first time in her life, and that when she took it back to Paris it gave great delight to her fellow-citizens, who said it was the first that had ever been seen in that city. Madame de Latour says that Madame de Genlis was mistaken, for the moss-rose came originally from Provence and had been known to the French for ages.
The French are said to have cultivated the Rose with extraordinary care and success. It was the favorite flower of the Empress Josephine, who caused her own name to be traced in the parterres at Malmaison with a plantation of the rarest roses. In the royal rosary at Versailles there are standards eighteen feet high grafted with twenty different varieties of the rose.
With the Romans it was no metaphor but an allusion to a literal fact when they talked of sleeping upon beds of roses. Cicero in his third oration against Verres, when charging the proconsul with luxurious habits, stated that he had made the tour of Sicily seated upon roses. And Seneca says, of course jestingly, that a Sybarite of the name of Smyrndiride was unable to sleep if one of the rose-petals on his bed happened to be curled! At a feast which Cleopatra gave to Marc Antony the floor of the hall was covered with fresh roses to the depth of eighteen inches. At a fête given by Nero at Baiae the sum of four millions of sesterces or about 20,000l. was incurred for roses. The Natives of India are fond of the rose, and are lavish in their expenditure at great festivals, but I suppose that no millionaire amongst them ever spent such an amount of money as this upon flowers alone.[076]
I shall close the poetical quotations on the Rose with one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deemFor that sweet odour which doth in it live.The canker-blooms have full as deep a dyeAs the perfumed tincture of the roses,Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,When summer's breath their masked buds discloses;But for their virtue only is their show,They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade;Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so;Of then sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.
There are many hundred acres of rose trees at Ghazeepore which are cultivated for distillation, and making "attar." There are large fields of roses in England also, for the manufacture of rose-water.
There is a story about the origin of attar of Roses. The Princess Nourmahal caused a large tank, on which she used to be rowed about with the great Mogul, to be filled with rose-water. The heat of the sun separating the water from the essential oil of the rose, the latter was observed to be floating on the surface. The discovery was immediately turned to good account. At Ghazeepoor, theessence,attaoruttarorotto, or whatever it should be called, is obtained with great simplicity and ease. After the rose water is prepared it is put into large open vessels which are left out at night. Early in the morning the oil that floats upon the surface is skimmed off, or sucked up with fine dry cotton wool, put into bottles, and carefully sealed. Bishop Heber says that to produce one rupee's weight of atta 200,000 well grown roses are required, and that a rupee's weight sells from 80 to 100 rupees. The atta sold in Calcutta is commonly adulterated with the oil of sandal wood.
LINNAEA BOREALIS
The LINNAEA BOREALIS, or two horned Linnaea, though a simple Lapland flower, is interesting to all botanists from its association with the name of the Swedish Sage. It has pretty little bells and is very fragrant. It is a wild, unobtrusive plant and is very averse to the trim lawn and the gay flower-border. This little woodland beauty pines away under too much notice. She prefers neglect, and would rather waste her sweetness on the desert air, than be introduced into the fashionable lists of Florist's flowers. She shrinks from exposure to the sun. A gentleman after walking with Linnaeus on the shores of the lake near Charlottendal on a lovely evening, writes thus "I gathered a small flower and asked if it was theLinnaea borealis. 'Nay,' said the philosopher, 'she lives not here, but in the middle of our largest woods. She clings with her little arms to the moss, and seems to resist very gently if you force her from it. She has a complexion like a milkmaid, and ah! she is very, very sweet and agreeable!"
THE FORGET-ME-NOT
The dear little FORGET-ME-NOT, (myosotis palustris)[077]with its eye of blue, is said to have derived its touching appellation from a sentimental German story. Two lovers were walking on the bank of a rapid stream. The lady beheld the flower growing on a little island, and expressed a passionate desire to possess it. He gallantly plunged into the stream and obtained the flower, but exhausted by the force of the tide, he had only sufficient strength left as he neared the shore to fling the flower at the fair one's feet, and exclaim "Forget-me-not!" (Vergiss-mein-nicht.) He was then carried away by the stream, out of her sight for ever.
THE PERIWINKLE.
The PERIWINKLE (vincaorpervinca) has had its due share of poetical distinction. In France the common people call it the Witch's violet. It seems to have suggested to Wordsworth an idea of the consciousness of flowers.
Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,The Periwinkle trailed its wreaths,And 'tis my faith that every flowerEnjoys the air it breathes.
Mr. J.L. Merritt, has some complimentary lines on this flower.
The Periwinkle with its fan-like leavesAll nicely levelled, is a lovely flowerWhose dark wreath, myrtle like, young Flora weaves;There's none more rareNor aught more meet to deck a fairy's bowerOr grace her hair.
The little blue Periwinkle is rendered especially interesting to the admirers of the genius of Rousseau by an anecdote that records his emotion on meeting it in one of his botanical excursions. He had seen it thirty years before in company with Madame de Warens. On meeting its sweet face again, after so long and eventful an interim, he fell upon his knees, crying out--Ah! voila de la pervanche!"It struck him," says Hazlitt, "as the same little identical flower that he remembered so well; and thirty years of sorrow and bitter regret were effaced from his memory."
The Periwinkle was once supposed to be a cure for many diseases. Lord Bacon says that in his time people afflicted with cramp wore bands of green periwinkle tied about their limbs. It had also its supposed moral influences. According to Culpepper the leaves of the flower if eaten by man and wife together would revive between them a lost affection.
THE BASIL.
Sweet marjoram, with her like,sweet basil, rare for smell.
Drayton.
The BASIL is a plant rendered poetical by the genius which has handled it. Boccaccio and Keats have made the name of thesweet basilsound pleasantly in the ears of many people who know nothing of botany. A species of this plant (known in Europe under the botanical name ofOcymum villosum, and in India as theToolsee) is held sacred by the Hindus. Toolsee was a disciple of Vishnu. Desiring to be his wife she excited the jealousy of Lukshmee by whom she was transformed into the herb named after her.[078]
THE TULIP.
Tulips, like the ruddy evening streaked.
Southey.
The TULIP (tulipa) is the glory of the garden, as far as color without fragrance can confer such distinction. Some suppose it to be 'The Lily of the Field' alluded to in the Sermon on the Mount. It grows wild in Syria.
The name of the tulip is said to be of Turkish origin. It was called Tulipa from its resemblance to the tulipan or turban.
What crouds the rich Divan to-dayWith turbaned heads, of every hueBowing before that veiled and awful faceLike Tulip-beds of different shapes and dyes,Bending beneath the invisible west wind's sighs?
Moore.
The reader has probably heard of the Tulipomania once carried to so great an excess in Holland.
With all his phlegm, it broke a Dutchman's heart,At a vast price, with one loved root to part.
Crabbe.
About the middle of the 17th century the city of Haarlem realized in three years ten millions sterling by the sale of tulips. A single tulip (theSemper Augustus) was sold for one thousand pounds. Twelve acres of land were given for a single root and engagements to the amount of £5,000 were made for a first-class tulip when the mania was at its height. A gentleman, who possessed a tulip of great value, hearing that some one was in possession of a second root of the same kind, eagerly secured it at a most extravagant price. The moment he got possession of it, he crushed it under his foot. "Now," he exclaimed, "my tulip is unique!"
A Dutch Merchant gave a sailor a herring for his breakfast. Jack seeing on the Merchant's counter what he supposed to be a heap of onions, took up a handful of them and ate them with his fish. The supposed onions were tulip bulbs of such value that they would have paid the cost of a thousand Royal feasts.[079]
The tulip mania never leached so extravagant a height in England as in Holland, but our country did not quite escape the contagion, and even so late as the year 1836 at the sale of Mr. Clarke's tulips at Croydon, seventy two pounds were given for a single bulb of theFanny Kemble; and a Florist in Chelsea in the same year, priced a bulb in his catalogue at 200 guineas.
The Tulip is not endeared to us by many poetical associations. We have read, however, one pretty and romantic tale about it. A poor old woman who lived amongst the wild hills of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, possessed a beautiful bed of Tulips, the pride of her small garden. One fine moonlight night her attention was arrested by the sweet music which seemed to issue from a thousand Liliputian choristers. She found that the sounds proceeded from her many colored bells of Tulips. After watching the flowers intently she perceived that they were not swayed to and fro by the wind, but by innumerable little beings that were climbing on the stems and leaves. They were pixies. Each held in its arms an elfin baby tinier than itself. She saw the babies laid in the bells of the plant, which were thus used as cradles, and the music was formed of many lullabies. When the babies were asleep the pixies or fairies left them, and gamboled on the neighbouring sward on which the old lady discovered the day after, several new green rings,--a certain evidence that her fancy had not deceived her! At earliest dawn the fairies had returned to the tulips and taken away their little ones. The good old woman never permitted her tulip bed to be disturbed. She regarded it as holy ground. But when she died, some Utilitarian gardener turned it into a parsley bed! The parsley never flourished. The ground was now cursed. In gratitude to the memory of the benevolent dame who had watched and protected the floral nursery, every month, on the night before the full moon, the fairies scattered flowers on her grave, and raised a sweet musical dirge--heard only by poetic ears--or by maids and children who
Hold each strange tale devoutly true.
For as the poet says:
What though no credit doubting wits may give,The fair and innocent shall still believe.
Men of genius are often as trustful as maids and children. Collins, himself a lover of the wonderful, thus speaks of Tasso:--
Prevailing poet! whose undoubting mindBelieved the magic wonders that he sung.
All nature indeed is full of mystery to the imaginative.
And visions as poetic eyes avowHang on each leaf and cling to every bough.
The Hindoos believe that the Peepul tree of which the foliage trembles like that of the aspen, has a spirit in every leaf.
"Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, Madam?" said Blake, the artist. "Never Sir." "Ihave," continued that eccentric genius, "One night I was walking alone in my garden. There was great stillness amongst the branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came: at last I perceivedthe broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers,bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with song, and then disappeared."
THE PINK.
The PINK (dianthus) is a very elegant flower. I have but a short story about it. The young Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis the Fifteenth, was brought up in the midst of flatterers as fulsome as those rebuked by Canute. The youthful prince was fond of cultivating pinks, and one of his courtiers, by substituting a floral changeling, persuaded him that one of those pinks planted by the royal hand had sprung up into bloom in a single night! One night, being unable to sleep, he wished to rise, but was told that it was midnight; he replied "Well then, I desire it to be morning."
The pink is one of the commonest of the flowers in English gardens. It is a great favorite all over Europe. The botanists have enumerated about 400 varieties of it.
THE PANSY OR HEARTS-EASE.
The PANSY (víola trîcolor) commonly calledHearts-ease, orLove-in- idleness, orHerb-Trinity(Flos Trinitarium), orThree-faces- under-a-hood, orKit-run-about, is one of the richest and loveliest of flowers.
The late Mrs. Siddons, the great actress, was so fond of this flower that she thought she could never have enough of it. Besides round beds of it she used it as an edging to all the flower borders in her garden. She liked to plant a favorite flower in large masses of beauty. But such beauty must soon fatigue the eye with its sameness. A round bed of one sort of flowers only is like a nosegay composed of one sort of flowers or of flowers of the same hue. She was also particularly fond of evergreens because they gave her garden a pleasant aspect even in the winter.
"Do you hear him?"--(John Bunyan makes the guide enquire of Christiana while a shepherd boy is singing beside his sheep)--"I will dare to say this boy leads a merrier life, and wears more of the herb calledhearts-easein his bosom, than he that is clothed in silk and purple."
Shakespeare has connected this flower with a compliment to the maiden Queen of England.
That very time I saw (but thou couldst not)Flying between the cold moon and the earth,Cupid all armed, a certain aim he tookAt a fair Vestal, throned by the west;And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bowAs it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaftQuenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon--And the imperial votaress passed onIn maiden meditation fancy free,Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.It fell upona little western flowers,Before milk white, now purple with love's wound--And maidens call itLOVE IN IDLENESSFetch me that flower, the herb I showed thee once,The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid,Will make or man or woman madly doteUpon the next live creature that it sees.Fetch me this herb and be thou here again,Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
Midsummer Night's Dream.
The hearts-ease has been cultivated with great care and success by some of the most zealous flower-fanciers amongst our countrymen in India. But it is a delicate plant in this clime, and requires most assiduous attention, and a close study of its habits. It always withers here under ordinary hands.
THE MIGNONETTE.
The MIGNONETTE, (reseda odorato,) the Frenchman'slittle darling, was not introduced into England until the middle of the 17th century. The Mignonette or Sweet Reseda was once supposed capable of assuaging pain, and of ridding men of many of the ills that flesh is heir to. It was applied with an incantation. This flower has found a place in the armorial bearings of an illustrious family of Saxony. I must tell the story: The Count of Walsthim loved the fair and sprightly Amelia de Nordbourg. She was a spoilt child and a coquette. She had an humble companion whose christian name was Charlotte. One evening at a party, all the ladies were called upon to choose a flower each, and the gentlemen were to make verses on the selections. Amelia fixed upon the flaunting rose, Charlotte the modest mignonette. In the course of the evening Amelia coquetted so desperately with a dashing Colonel that the Count could not suppress his vexation. On this he wrote a verse for the Rose:
Elle ne vit qu'un jour, et ne plait qu'un moment.(She lives but for a day and pleases but for a moment)
He then presented the following line on the Mignonette to the gentle Charlotte:
"Ses qualities surpassent ses charmes."
The Count transferred his affections to Charlotte, and when he married her, added a branch of the Sweet Reseda to the ancient arms of his family, with the motto of
Your qualities surpass your charms.
VERVAIN.
The vervain--That hind'reth witches of their will.
Drayton
VERVAIN (verbena) was called by the Greeksthe sacred herb. It was used to brush their altars. It was supposed to keep off evil spirits. It was also used in the religious ceremonies of the Druids and is still held sacred by the Persian Magi. The latter lay branches of it on the altar of the sun.
The ancients had theirVerbenaliawhen the temples were strewed with vervain, and no incantation or lustration was deemed perfect without the aid of this plant. It was supposed to cure the bite of a serpent or a mad dog.
THE DAISY.
The DAISY or day's eye (bellis perennis) has been the darling of the British poets from Chaucer to Shelley. It is not, however, the darling of poets only, but of princes and peasants. And it is not man's favorite only, but, as Wordsworth says, Nature's favorite also. Yet it is "the simplest flower that blows." Its seed is broadcast on the land. It is the most familiar of flowers. It sprinkles every field and lane in the country with its little mimic stars. Wordsworth pays it a beautiful compliment in saying that
Oft alone in nooks remoteWe meet it like a pleasant thoughtWhen such is wanted.
But though this poet dearly loved the daisy, in some moods of mind he seems to have loved the little celandine (common pilewort) even better. He has addressed two poems to this humble little flower. One begins with the following stanza.
Pansies, Lilies, Kingcups, Daisies,Let them live upon their praises;Long as there's a sun that setsPrimroses will have their glory;Long as there are Violets,They will have a place in story:There's a flower that shall be mine,'Tis the little Celandine.
No flower is too lowly for the affections of Wordsworth. Hazlitt says, "the daisy looks up to Wordsworth with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance; a withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections; and even the lichens on the rocks have a life and being in his thoughts."
The Lesser Celandine, is an inodorous plant, but as Wordsworth possessed not the sense of smell, to him a deficiency of fragrance in a flower formed no objection to it. Miss Martineau alludes to a newspaper report that on one occasion the poet suddenly found himself capable of enjoying the fragrance of a flower, and gave way to an emotion of tumultuous rapture. But I have seen this contradicted. Miss Martineau herself has generally no sense of smell, but we have her own testimony to the fact that a brief enjoyment of the faculty once actually occurred to her. In her case there was a simultaneous awakening of two dormant faculties-- the sense of smell and the sense of taste. Once and once only, she enjoyed the scent of a bottle of Eau de Cologne and the taste of meat. The two senses died away again almost in their birth.
Shelley calls Daisies "those pearled Arcturi of the earth"--"the constellated flower that never sets."
The Father of English poets does high honor to this star of the meadow in the "Prologue to the Legend of Goode Women."
He tells us that in the merry month of May he was wont to quit even his beloved books to look upon the fresh morning daisy.
Of all the floures in the medeThen love I most these floures white and red,Such that men callen Daisies in our town,To them I have so great affectión.As I sayd erst, when comen is the Maie,That in my bedde there dawneth me no daieThat I nam up and walking in the medeTo see this floure agenst the Sunne sprede,When it up riseth early by the morrowThat blisfull sight softeneth all my sorrow.
Chaucer.
The poet then goes on with his hearty laudation of this lilliputian luminary of the fields, and hesitates not to describe it as "of all floures the floure." The famous Scottish Peasant loved it just as truly, and did it equal honor. Who that has once read, can ever forget his harmonious and pathetic address to a mountain daisy on turning it up with the plough? I must give the poem a place here, though it must be familiar to every reader. But we can read it again and again, just as we can look day after day with undiminished interest upon the flower that it commemorates.
Mrs. Stowe (the American writer) observes that "the daisy with its wide plaited ruff and yellow centre is not our (that is, an American's) flower. The English flower is the
Wee, modest, crimson tippéd flower
which Burns celebrated. It is what we (in America) raise in green-houses and call the Mountain Daisy. Its effect, growing profusely about fields and grass-plats, is very beautiful."
TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY.
ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH IN APRIL, 1786
Wee, modest, crimson tippéd flow'r,Thou's met me in an evil hour,For I maun[080]crush amang the stoure[081]Thy slender stem,To spare thee now is past my pow'r,Thou bonnie gem.Alas! its no thy neobor sweet,The bonnie lark, companion meet,Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet[082]Wi' speckled breast,When upward springing, blythe, to greetThe purpling eastCauld blew the bitter biting northUpon thy early, humble, birth,Yet cheerfully thou glinted[083]forthAmid the storm,Scarce reared above the patient earthThy tender formThe flaunting flowers our gardens yield,High sheltering woods and wa's[084]maun shield,But thou beneath the random bield[085]O' clod or stane,Adorns the histie[086]stibble field[087]Unseen, alane.There, in thy scanty mantle clad,Thy snawye bosom sun ward spread,Thou lifts thy unassuming headIn humble guise,But now the share up tears thy bed,And low thou lies!Such is the fate of artless Maid,Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade!By love's simplicity betrayed,And guileless trust,Till she, like thee, all soiled is laidLow i' the dust.Such is the fate of simple Bard,On Life's rough ocean luckless starred!Unskilful he to note the cardOf prudent lore,Till billows rage, and gales blow hardAnd whelm him o'er!Such fate to suffering worth is givenWho long with wants and woes has strivenBy human pride or cunning drivenTo misery's brink,Till wrenched of every stay but Heaven,He, ruined, sink!Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,That fate is thine--no distant date;Stern Ruin's plough-share drives elate,Full on thy bloom;Till crushed beneath the furrow's weightShall be thy doom.
Burns.
The following verses though they make no pretension to the strength and pathos of the poem by the great Scottish Peasant, have a grace and simplicity of their own, for which they have long been deservedly popular.
A FIELD FLOWER.
ON FINDING ONE IN FULL BLOOM, ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1803.
There is a flower, a little flower,With silver crest and golden eye,That welcomes every changing hour,And weathers every sky.The prouder beauties of the fieldIn gay but quick succession shine,Race after race their honours yield,They flourish and decline.But this small flower, to Nature dear,While moons and stars their courses run,Wreathes the whole circle of the year,Companion of the sun.It smiles upon the lap of May,To sultry August spreads its charms,Lights pale October on his way,And twines December's arms.The purple heath and golden broom,On moory mountains catch the gale,O'er lawns the lily sheds perfume,The violet in the vale.But this bold floweret climbs the hill,Hides in the forest, haunts the glen,Plays on the margin of the rill,Peeps round the fox's den.Within the garden's cultured roundIt shares the sweet carnation's bed;And blooms on consecrated groundIn honour of the dead.The lambkin crops its crimson gem,The wild-bee murmurs on its breast,The blue-fly bends its pensile stem,Light o'er the sky-lark's nest.'Tis FLORA'S page,--in every place,In every season fresh and fair;It opens with perennial grace.And blossoms everywhere.On waste and woodland, rock and plain,Its humble buds unheeded rise;The rose has but a summer-reign;The DAISY never dies.
James Montgomery.
Montgomery has another very pleasing poetical address to the daisy. The poem was suggested by the first plant of the kind which had appeared in India. The flower sprang up unexpectedly out of some English earth, sent with other seeds in it, to this country. The amiable Dr. Carey of Serampore was the lucky recipient of the living treasure, and the poem is supposed to be addressed by him to the dear little flower of his home, thus born under a foreign sky. Dr. Carey was a great lover of flowers, and it was one of his last directions on his death-bed, as I have already said, that his garden should be always protected from the intrusion of Goths and Vandals in the form of Bengallee goats and cows. I must give one stanza of Montgomery's second poetical tribute to the small flower with "the silver crest and golden eye."
Thrice-welcome, little English flower!To this resplendent hemisphereWhere Flora's giant offsprings towerIn gorgeous liveries all the year;Thou, only thou, art little hereLike worth unfriended and unknown,Yet to my British heart more dearThan all the torrid zone.
It is difficult to exaggerate the feeling with which an exile welcomes a home-flower. A year or two ago Dr. Ward informed the Royal Institution of London, that a single primrose had been taken to Australia in a glass-case and that when it arrived there in full bloom, the sensation it excited was so great that even those who were in the hot pursuit of gold, paused in their eager career to gaze for a moment upon the flower of their native fields, and such immense crowds at last pressed around it that it actually became necessary to protect it by a guard.
My last poetical tribute to the Daisy shall be three stanzas from Wordsworth, from two different addresses to the same flower.
With little here to do or seeOf things that in the great world be,Sweet Daisy! oft I talk to thee,For thou art worthy,Thou unassuming Common-placeOf Nature, with that homely face,And yet with something of a grace,Which Love makes for thee!
If stately passions in me burn,And one chance look to Thee should turn,I drink out of an humbler urnA lowlier pleasure;The homely sympathy that heedsThe common life, our nature breeds;A wisdom fitted to the needsOf hearts at leisure.When, smitten by the morning ray,I see thee rise, alert and gay,Then, cheerful Flower! my spirits playWith kindred gladness;And when, at dusk, by dews opprestThou sink'st, the image of thy restHath often eased my pensive breastOf careful sadness.
It is peculiarly interesting to observe how the profoundest depths of thought and feeling are sometimes stirred in the heart of genius by the smallest of the works of Nature. Even more ordinarily gifted men are similarly affected to the utmost extent of their intellect and sensibility. We grow tired of the works of man. In the realms of art we ever crave something unseen before. We demand new fashions, and when the old are once laid aside, we wonder that they should ever have excited even a moment's admiration. But Nature, though she is always the same, never satiates us. The simple little Daisy which Burns has so sweetly commemorated is the same flower that was "of all flowres the flowre," in the estimation of the Patriarch of English poets, and which so delighted Wordsworth in his childhood, in his middle life, and in his old age. He gazed on it, at intervals, with unchanging affection for upwards of fourscore years.
The Daisy--the miniature sun with its tiny rays--is especially the favorite of our earliest years. In our remembrances of the happy meadows in which we played in childhood, the daisy's silver lustre is ever connected with the deeper radiance of its gay companion, the butter-cup, which when held against the dimple on the cheek or chin of beauty turns it into a little golden dell. The thoughtful and sensitive frequenter of rural scenes discovers beauty every where; though it is not always the sort of beauty that would satisfy the taste of men who recognize no gaiety or loveliness beyond the walls of cities. To the poet's eye even the freckles on a milk-maid's brow are not without a grace, associated as they are with health, and the open sunshine.
Chaucer tells us that the French call the DaisyLa belle Marguerite. There is a little anecdote connected with the appellation. Marguerite of Scotland, the Queen of Louis the Eleventh, presented Marguerite Clotilde de Surville, a poetess, with a bouquet of daisies, with this inscription; "Marguerite d'Ecosse à Marguerite (the pearl) d'Helicon."
The country maidens in England practise a kind of sortilége with this flower. They pluck off leaf by leaf, saying alternately "He loves me" and "He loves me not." The omen or oracle is decided by the fall of either sentence on the last leaf.
It is extremely difficult to rear the daisy in India. It is accustomed to all weathers in England, but the long continued sultriness of this clime makes it as delicate as a languid English lady in a tropical exile, and however carefully and skilfully nursed, it generally pines for its native air and dies.[088]
THE PRICKLY GORSE.
--Yon swelling downs where the sweet air stirsThe harebells, and where prickly furzeBuds lavish gold.
Keat's Endymion.
Fair maidens, I'll sing you a song,I'll tell of the bonny wild flower,Whose blossoms so yellow, and branches so long,O'er moor and o'er rough rocky mountains are flungFar away from trim garden and bower
L.A. Tuamley.
The PRICKLY GORSE or Goss or Furze, (ulex)[089]I cannot omit to notice, because it was the plant which of all others most struck Dillenius when he first trod on English ground. He threw himself on his knees and thanked Heaven that he had lived to see the golden undulation of acres of wind-waved gorse. Linnaeus lamented that he could scarcely keep it alive in Sweden even in a greenhouse.
I have the most delightful associations connected with this plant, and never think of it without a summer feeling and a crowd of delightful images and remembrances of rural quietude and blue skies and balmy breezes. Cowper hardly does it justice:
The common, over-grown with fern, and roughWith prickly gorse, that shapeless and deformedAnd dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloomAnd decks itself with ornaments of gold,Yields no unpleasing ramble.
The plant is indeed irregularly shaped, but it is notdeformed, and if it is dangerous to the touch, so also is the rose, unless it be of that species which Milton places in Paradise--"and without thorns the rose."
Hurdis is more complimentary and more just to the richest ornament of the swelling hill and the level moor.
And what more noble than the vernal furzeWith golden caskets hung?
I have seen wholecoteesorcoteaux(sides of hills) in the sweet little island of Jersey thickly mantled with the golden radiance of this beautiful wildflower. The whole Vallée des Vaux (the valley of vallies) is sometimes alive with its lustre.
VALLEE DES VAUX.
AIR--THE MEETING OF THE WATERS.
If I dream of the past, at fair Fancy's command,Up-floats from the blue sea thy small sunny land!O'er thy green hills, sweet Jersey, the fresh breezes blow,And silent and warm is the Vallée des Vaux!There alone have I loitered 'mid blossoms of gold,And forgot that the great world was crowded and cold,Nor believed that a land of enchantment could showA vale more divine than the Vallée des Vaux.A few scattered cots, like white clouds in the sky,Or like still sails at sea when the light breezes die,And a mill with its wheel in the brook's silver glow,Form thy beautiful hamlet, sweet Vallée des Vaux!As the brook prattled by like an infant at play,And each wave as it passed stole a moment away,I thought how serenely a long life would flow,By the sweet little brook in the Vallée des Vaux.
D.L.R.
Jersey is not the only one of the Channel Islands that is enriched with "blossoms of gold." In the sister island of Guernsey the prickly gorse is much used for hedges, and Sir George Head remarks that the premises of a Guernsey farmer are thus as impregnably fortified and secured as if his grounds were surrounded by a stone wall. In the Isle of Man the furze grows so high that it is sometimes more like a fir tree than the ordinary plant.
There is an old proverb:--"When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion"--that isnever. The gorse blooms all the year.
FERN.
I'll seek the shaggy fern-clad hillAnd watch, 'mid murmurs muttering stern,The seed departing from the fernEre wakeful demons can conveyThe wonder-working charm away.
Leyden.
"The green and graceful Fern" (filices) with its exquisite tracery must not be overlooked. It recalls many noble home-scenes to British eyes. Pliny says that "of ferns there are two kinds, and they bear neither flowers nor seed." And this erroneous notion of the fern bearing no seed was common amongst the English even so late as the time of Addison who ridicules "a Doctor that had arrived at the knowledge of the green and red dragon,and had discovered the female fern-seed." The seed is very minute and might easily escape a careless eye. In the present day every one knows that the seed of the fern lies on the under side of the leaves, and a single leaf will often bear some millions of seeds. Even those amongst the vulgar who believed the plant bore seed, had an idea that the seeds were visible only at certain mysterious seasons and to favored individuals who by carrying a quantity of it on their person, were able, like those who wore the helmet of Pluto or the ring of Gyges, to walk unseen amidst a crowd. The seed was supposed to be best seen at a certain hour of the night on which St. John the Baptist was born.
We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible,
Shakespeare's Henry IV. Part I.
In Beaumont's and Fletcher'sFair Maid of the Inn, is the following allusion to the fern.
--Had you Gyges' ring,Or the herb that gives invisibility.
Ben Jonson makes a similar allusion to it:
I hadNo medicine, sir, to go invisible,No fern-seed in my pocket.
Pope puts a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (Asplenium trichomanes) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from evil influences in the Cave of Spleen.
Safe passed the gnome through this fantastic bandA branch of healing spleen-wort in his hand.
The fern forms a splendid ornament for shadowy nooks and grottoes, or fragments of ruins, or heaps of stones, or the odd corners of a large garden or pleasure-ground.
I have had many delightful associations with this plant both at home and abroad. When I visited the beautiful Island of Penang, Sir William Norris, then the Recorder of the Island, and who was a most indefatigable collector of ferns, obligingly presented me with a specimen of every variety that he had discovered in the hills and vallies of that small paradise; and I suppose that in no part of the world could a finer collection of specimens of the fern be made for a botanist'sherbarium. Fern leaves will look almost as well ten years after they are gathered as on the day on which they are transferred from the dewy hillside to the dry pages of a book.
Jersey and Penang are the two loveliest islands on a small scale that I have yet seen: the latter is the most romantic of the two and has nobler trees and a richer soil and a brighter sky--but they are both charming retreats for the lovers of peace and nature. As I have devoted some verses to Jersey I must have some also on
THE ISLAND OF PENANG.
I.I stand upon the mountain's brow--I drink the cool fresh, mountain breeze--I see thy little town below,[090]Thy villas, hedge-rows, fields and trees,And hail thee with exultant glow,GEM OF THE ORIENTAL SEAS!II.A cloud had settled on my heart--My frame had borne perpetual pain--I yearned and panted to departFrom dread Bengala's sultry plain--Fate smiled,--Disease withholds his dart--I breathe the breath of life again!III.With lightened heart, elastic tread,Almost with youth's rekindled flame,I roam where loveliest scenes outspreadRaise thoughts and visions none could name,Save those on whom the Muses shedA spell, a dower of deathless fame.IV.Ifeel, but oh! could ne'erpourtray,Sweet Isle! thy charms of land and wave,The bowers that own no winter day,The brooks where timid wild birds lave,The forest hills where insects gay[091]Mimic the music of the brave!V.I see from this proud airy heightA lovely Lilliput below!Ships, roads, groves, gardens, mansions white,And trees in trimly ordered row,[092]Present almost a toy like sight,A miniature scene, a fairy show!VI.But lo! beyond the ocean stream,That like a sheet of silver lies,As glorious as a poet's dreamThe grand Malayan mountains rise,And while their sides in sunlight beamTheir dim heads mingle with the skies.VI.Men laugh at bards who livein clouds--The cloudsbeneathme gather now,Or gliding slow in solemn crowds,Or singly, touched with sunny glow,Like mystic shapes in snowy shrouds,Or lucid veils on Beauty's brow.VIII.While all around the wandering eyeBeholds enchantments rich and rare,Of wood, and water, earth, and skyA panoramic vision fair,The dyal breathes his liquid sigh,And magic floats upon the air!IX.Oh! lovely and romantic Isle!How cold the heart thou couldst not please!Thy very dwellings seem to smileLike quiet nests mid summer trees!I leave thy shores--but weep the while--GEM OF THE ORIENTAL SEAS!