THE LOVE OF FLOWERS. 121 



tiickle in our veins." Let us mingle with the sweet children of the 

 woods, and hold communings with nature in her own peaceful solitudes. 

 We will lie in green meads where daisies grow, and bask us in the 

 sunshine ; lie by the streamlet's brim, and plait rushes, and talk to 

 our own images in the glassy waters ; hide in flowery nooks and 

 dingles, and murmur snatches of wild old songs, until we laugh our- 

 selves into a very incarnation of gladness ; we'll build our fairy 

 palaces with a geometry of sunbeams, and climb upwards on our 

 dreamy destiny till the universe becomes our temple. 



Tiie soul clings to beauty, but it needs a constant intercourse with 

 nature to keep the love of beauty fresh and vigorous within us. How 

 little do they, who rise when the sun is in the mid-heavens, and spend 

 the precious hours in luxury and listlessness, know of the intense 

 charms of which existence is capable ; they have no care for the wide- 

 stretching landscape, and the lone river side; they are strangers to 

 the cheering influences which raise the heart to an excess of exhila- 

 ration, and give the firm footstep an untiring energy and elasticity ; 

 the odour of the wild cannot refresh their languid senses ; they can- 

 not lie down upon the broad lieath-land, with its wide sheets of 

 purple blossoms glowing in the sunlight, and feel the heart expand 

 with an excess of feeling far too deep for words ; the music of many 

 voices they know not ; the charms of poetry, and above all of love 

 — love, deep, passionate, and pure — they know not, and exist- 

 ence to them is but a passive and passionless dream. We well re- 

 member an old man, we can call to memory his snowy locks, and 

 trembling step, whose early days had been passed in the grassy glades 

 of the New Forest, but whose fate, in later years, had been to linger 

 on in penury between the brick walls of this great city. In a narrow 

 court, amid squalor and vsnretchedness, where the houses were too close 

 for the sunlight ever to fall upon the ground, and where, on the 

 brightest day in June, only a thin wretched strip of blue appeared 

 above, had this old man passed the latest years of his life ; but he 

 never forgot the haunts and recollections of his childhood — the old 

 woods, the giant trees, and the flowers of dingle and dell ; and when 

 in May, the little children wandered out from their wretched homes, 

 to breathe the pure air of heaven in the golden meadows, his eyes 

 would glisten with delight to accept their little gifts of buttercups 

 and daisies, and many times have we seen him in an exultation of 

 feeling, at the remembrance of the scenes and associations of his 



