OUR PASTORAL LIFE. 229 



Allan Ramsay and Gilfillan allude to the rush-pulling more explicitly, 

 but they have marred the pleasure of its remembrance by severing 

 the custom from its befitting years. Thus Ramsay makes a love-lorn 

 swain tell us : — 



" I took delyte 

 To pou the Rashes green, wi' roots sae white. 

 Of which, as well as my young fancy cou'd, 

 For thee I plet the flowery belt and snood." 



And thus Gilfillan sings : — 



" When we deck'd our woodland Queen, 

 In the rashy chaplet green. 

 And gay she look'd I ween ! 

 By our ain burnside." 



Now this is to burlesque the custom, and to misunderstand human 

 nature, for it were indeed to expose to laughter even the youngest 

 sweetheart so to adorn her. At its earliest, love does not bud until 

 we have put away our childish pretty things, and neither blossoms 

 nor fruits until the genial season calls forth affections which prompt 

 the wooer to offer more persuasive and appropriate gifts. 



As men and women are but children of a larger growth, so the 

 same feelings and instincts which led our youngsters to the pied fields 

 to gather the daisie, the rathe primrose, the tufted crowtoes, the 

 glowing violet, the wan cowslip, and every vernal flower and floweret 

 of a thousand hues, continue their wholesome influence over us 

 throughout life. Nor can it be otherwise. When the Creator had 

 clothed the earth with grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, 

 and the tree yielding fruit. He pronounced the whole to be "good;" 

 and that which was good to Him must necessarily be good also to 

 Man whom He was pleased to create in His own image. Hence our 

 innate and enduring love of flowers ; hence the pleasure we expe- 

 rience in finding them made illustrative of our humanity in either its 

 physical or moral attributes ; and the pleasure we have in seeing 

 them lead on the opening year, and conduct it to its autumnal close. 

 And these pleasures never pall nor fade, for they are not too exacting, 

 nor so strong as to overmaster and enslave the reason even for a time. 

 Such pleasure is carnal, and seldom without an alloy ; but the sensa- 

 tions born of flowers approach the spiritual, and, being temperate, 

 they not only do not repress, but they cherish to fuller growth and 

 beauty our most grateful feelings, and put the individual in a state 

 of mind in which he would continue as if in Paradise, could Paradise 

 be settled down on earth. The evanescent nature of the animal 

 pleasure. Burns has strikingly illustrated by the extreme deciduous- 

 ness of the Poppy : — 



" But pleasures are like poppies spread. 

 You seize the flower, its bloom is shed ;" 



whereas the love of flowers endures not only from early morn to 

 dewy eve, — not merely throughout the varied year, — but lives in the 

 busy seasons of manhood, and reflourishes with the freshness and 



