Flowers And Flower-Gardens Part 21

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 field In 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 round It shares the sweet carnation's bed; And blooms on consecrated ground In 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 hemisphere Where Flora's giant offsprings tower In gorgeous liveries all the year; Thou, only thou, art little here Like worth unfriended and unknown, Yet to my British heart more dear Than 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 Inst.i.tution of London, that a single primrose had been taken to Australia in a gla.s.s-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 see Of things that in the great world be, Sweet Daisy! oft I talk to thee, For thou art worthy, Thou una.s.suming Common-place Of Nature, with that homely face, And yet with something of a grace, Which Love makes for thee!

If stately pa.s.sions in me burn, And one chance look to Thee should turn, I drink out of an humbler urn A lowlier pleasure; The homely sympathy that heeds The common life, our nature breeds; A wisdom fitted to the needs Of hearts at leisure.

When, smitten by the morning ray, I see thee rise, alert and gay, Then, cheerful Flower! my spirits play With kindred gladness; And when, at dusk, by dews opprest Thou sink'st, the image of thy rest Hath often eased my pensive breast Of 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 l.u.s.tre is ever connected with the deeper radiance of its gay companion, the b.u.t.ter-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, a.s.sociated as they are with health, and the open sunshine.

Chaucer tells us that the French call the Daisy _La 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 a Marguerite (_the pearl_) d'Helicon."

The country maidens in England practise a kind of sortilege 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 p.r.i.c.kLY GORSE.

--Yon swelling downs where the sweet air stirs The harebells, and where p.r.i.c.kly furze Buds 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 flung Far away from trim garden and bower

_L.A. Tuamley_.

The p.r.i.c.kLY 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 a.s.sociations 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 rough With p.r.i.c.kly gorse, that shapeless and deformed And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom And decks itself with ornaments of gold, Yields no unpleasing ramble.

The plant is indeed irregularly shaped, but it is not _deformed_, 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 n.o.ble than the vernal furze With golden caskets hung?

I have seen whole _cotees_ or _coteaux_ (sides of hills) in the sweet little island of Jersey thickly mantled with the golden radiance of this beautiful wildflower. The whole Vallee des Vaux (_the valley of vallies_) is sometimes alive with its l.u.s.tre.

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 Vallee 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 show A vale more divine than the Vallee 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 Vallee des Vaux!

As the brook prattled by like an infant at play, And each wave as it pa.s.sed stole a moment away, I thought how serenely a long life would flow, By the sweet little brook in the Vallee 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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.