ON THE LOVE OF FLOAVEES, 249 



ON THE LOVE OF FLOWERS. 



In recent pages of the Floricultural Cabinet I notice that attention 

 is now directed to the beautiful wild flowers of our own country. I 

 recollect the following- lines on these and others were given me by a 

 friend, and I forward them for insertion, as it exhibits that they appeared 

 lovely in the eyes of others before us. 



There is an inspiration in the works of nature which gives a more 

 than usual power even to talents of a common order, wlien treating of 

 them ; and although we take greater delight in the rose, tlie violet, or 

 the lily, we also love to pluck from the hedge-side the hawthorn and 

 the ragged-robin. Wordsworth very naturally describes the inclination 

 we have to gather wild flowers : 



-" We paused, one dott, 



And now the other, to point out, perchance 

 To pluck, some flower or water-weed, too fair 

 Either to be divided from the place 

 On which it grew, or to be left alone 

 To its own beauty." 



On some occasions it has been necessary not only to cast aside the 

 hedge-flowers of poetry, but also to pass by the roses. Even Chaucer, 

 so copious are his praises of some of his favourite flowers, we could not 

 venture to quote so insatiably as inclination would lead us. Most of 

 our best poets have touched upon the beauty of flowers, more or less: 

 — Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakspeare, the great poetic lumina- 

 ries of our island, 



" the sages 



Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages," 



have all dwelt largely on them. Ben Jonson, too, and Beaumont and 

 Fletcher, Drayton, Dryden, Thomson, Cowper, &c. In our own times, 

 Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, Hunt, Keats, Scott, Montgomery, Corn- 

 wall, and Clare, have revelled in them like bees. It has been remarked 

 as a defect in Pope, that he says little or nothing, in his poems, of the 

 works of nature ; and it does appear an extraordinary thing in a poet, 

 so tremblingly alive to beauty in every shape as poets naturally are, 

 and necessarily must be. Pope was a poet for the drawing-room ; but 

 there are few even among ungifted individuals totally insensible to the 

 soothing influence of flowers and trees : 



" The enamelled earth, that from her verdant breast 

 Lavished spontaneously ambrosial flowers, 

 The very sight of which can soothe to rest 

 A thousand cares, and charm our sweetest hours." Gabcilasso. 



" This lucid fount, whose murmurs fill the mind. 

 The verdant forests waving with the wind. 

 The odours wafted from the mead, the flowers 

 In which the wild bee sits and sings for hours ; 

 These might the moodiest misanthrope employ. 

 Make sound the sick, and turn distress to joy." Ibid. 



If flowers liave so much beauty in common eyes, wliat must they be 

 in tiie eye of a poet, whicli gives new charms to every object on which 

 it gazes ! A poet sees in a flower not only itb form and colour, and 



