300 WILD FLOWERS. 



author in his " Hyperion " his prose, but yet his 

 greatest, poem refers to the same familiar plant 

 when he makes his hero stoop " to pluck one bright 

 blue flower, which bloomed alone in the vast desert, 

 and looked up to him, as if to say, ' oh, take me 

 with you leave me not here companionless/ " 



Where ideas are equally the offspring of imagi- 

 nation we are free to choose between them as our 

 fancy lists, but pleasanter far is the image thus ex- 

 pressed the yearning for human sympathy, for 

 human companionship, attributed to the inanimate 

 creations of the vegetable world than that con- 

 veyed by the school of pseudo-benevolence, which 

 declares its philo-phytological sensibilities to be so 

 tender as not to endure the thought of severing a 

 blossom from the parent stem, which it endows with 

 positive feeling. For my own part I feel a real 

 pleasure in gathering the flowers in which I delight ; 

 and if we must like the Greeks of old endue 

 with sentiment all beautiful things, we should in 

 our imagination attribute to them some moral mean- 

 ing rather than endue them with physical feelings. 

 I can yet look back with the disgust of early child- 

 hood on the poems, and diluted story-books vainly 

 though with the very laudable desire of making 

 us tender-hearted and merciful urged on our at- 

 tention to prove to us the cruelty* of gathering the 

 flowers which made our very lives glad. Such les- 

 sons proceeded from a very inadequate conception 

 of the nature or requirements of a child's mind, and 



* A kind of poetical instinct makes one regard as very 

 beautiful the belief of the natives of the Society Isles, that 



