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 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 see
Of things that in the great world be,
Sweet Daisy! oft I talk to thee,
For thou art worthy,
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of 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 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 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 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]