Such fate to suffering worth is given, Who long with wants and woes has striv'n, To mis'ry's brink, Till wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n, He, ruin'd, sink! Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, Till, crush'd beneath the furrow's weight, Shall be thy doom!" BURNS. ROBERT HERRICK is, in his quaint way, a master of this art: "Fair Daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early rising sun Until the hasting day "Sweet violets, Love's paradise, that spread Your gracious odours, which you couched bear Upon the gentle wing of some calm-breathing wind, If by the favour of propitious stars you gain And when her warmth your moisture forth doth wear, You pretty daughters of the earth and sun, My bitter sighs, that have my heart undone!" RALEIGH. Another of "the banished minds," has a love simile for the small flower bursting its "frosty prison: "— “All as the hungry winter-starved earth, Where she by nature labours towards her birth, Till the small flower, whose root is now unbound, Where but one thought of Rosamond did rest.” DRAYTON. But there are loftier feelings associated with flowers. Love, in some poetical minds, rises into devotion to the Great Source of all beauty and joy. Never were Spring-flowers the parents of holier thoughts than are found in this poem of HERBERT :— 66 'How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev'n as the flow'rs in spring; Grief melts away like snow in May; As if there were no such cold thing. VOL. I. Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart To see their mother-root, when they have blown; These are thy wonders, Lord of power! Oh, that I once past changing were; Fast in thy Paradise, where no flow'r can wither! Off'ring at heav'n, growing and groaning thither: But, while I grow in a straight line Still upwards bent, as if heav'n were mine own, What frost to that? What pole is not the zone Where all things burn, when thou dost turn, And now in age I bud again: After so many deaths I live and write : I once more smell the dew and rain ; On whom thy tempests fell all night! These are thy wonders, Lord of love! To make us see that we are but flow'rs that glide. HERBERT. R By the side of our old poet of the English Church may we worthily place the devotional poem on Flowers of a Transatlantic bard :— 66 Spake full well, in language quaint and olden, One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine, Stars they are, wherein we read our history, Yet not so wrapped about with awful mystery, Wonderous truths, and manifold as wonderous, Bright and glorious is that revelation In these stars of earth-these golden flowers. And the Poet, faithful and far-seeing, Sees, alike in stars and flowers, a part Of the selfsame, universal being, Which is throbbing in his brain and heart. Gorgeous flowerets in the sunlight shining; Brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues, These in flowers and men are more than seeming; Which the Poet, in no idle dreaming, Seeth in himself, and in the flowers. Everywhere about us are they glowing, Some like stars, to tell us Spring is born: Not alone in Spring's armorial bearing, Not alone in meadows and green alleys, Not alone in her vast dome of glory, In the cottage of the rudest peasant, In ancestral houses, whose crumbling towers, Tell us of the ancient Games of Flowers; In all places, then, and in all seasons, And with child-like, credulous affection Emblems of the bright and better land." LONGFELLOW. Go then into the fields when the snow melts and the earth is unbound. Pry into the hedges for the first Primrose; see if there be a Daisy nestling in the short grass; look for the little Celandine : |