84 WILD FLOWEKS. 



di Santa Caterina; so welcome to all is this 

 flower of the spring. For, in the words of Shake- 

 speare, 



" When daffodils begin to peer 

 With heigh ! the doxy* over the dale 

 Why then comes in the sweet of the year." 



" And when the month of Maie, 

 Is comin, and I here the foulis sing, 

 And that the flouris ginnin for to spring,"f 



it is time as Coleridge says, to 



" Leave the hearth, and leave the house 

 To the cricket and the mouse. 

 Find gran' am out a sunny seat, 

 With babe and lambkin at her feet ; 

 Not a soul at home must stay !" 



For 



" All nature seems at work, slugs leave their lair 

 The bees are stirring birds are on the wing 

 And winter, slumbering in the open air 

 Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring !" 



In Cornwall the daffodils are still called " Lent 

 lilies," and doubtless are the flowers to which this 

 old English name properly belongs, though now 

 generally applied to various lilies. 



The botanical name Narcissus having been given 

 to the daffodil, has confounded it with the Greek 

 Narcissus, which was the other allied plantj known 

 in English by that name, and was so called from 

 the word va/ojo?, stupor, on account of the over- 

 powering effect produced by the smell of that flower, 



* The glory. t Chaucer. 



The N. poeticus, or others. 



