"Daisy stars whose firmament is green."
Burns, whose "Ode to a Mountain Daisy" is so universally admired,
gives, besides, a few brief notices of the daisy:
"The lowly daisy sweetly blows--"
"The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air."
Tennyson has made the daisy a subject of one of his most
unsatisfactory poems. In "Maud," he writes:
"Her feet have touched the meadows
And left the daisies rosy."
To Wordsworth, the poet of nature, the daisy seems perfectly
intelligible. Scattered throughout the lowly places, with
meekness it seems to shed beauty over its surroundings, and
compensate for gaudy vesture by cheerful contentment. Wordsworth
calls the daisy "the poet's darling," "a nun demure," "a little
Cyclops," "an unassuming commonplace of nature," and sums up its
excellences in a verse which may fitly conclude our attempt to
pluck a bouquet of fresh daisies from the poets:
"Sweet flower! for by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast;
Sweet silent creature!
That breath'st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!"
--_A.S. Isaacs_.
* * * * *
_COLERIDGE AS A PLAGIARIST._