xxxvi PREFACE. 



These might the moodiest misanthrope employ, 

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



Ibid. 



If flowers have so much beauty in common eyes, what 

 must they be in the eye of a poet, which gives new 

 charms to every object on which it gazes ! A poet sees in 

 a flower not only its form and colour, and the shadowing 

 of its verdant foliage his eye rests upon the dew-drop that 

 trembles on the leaf ; a gleam of sunshine darts across, and 

 gives it the sparkling brilliancy of a diamond. He sees the 

 bee hovering around, buzzing its joyous anticipation of the 

 honey he shall draw from its very heart ; and the delicate 

 butterfly suspended as it were by magic from its silken 

 petals. His imagination, too, brings around it a world of 

 associations, adding beauty and interest to the object actu- 

 ally before his eye. Thus flowers have been described in 

 all their seasons, and in every variety of situation and cir- 

 cumstance, budding forth in timid beauty in the early spring, 

 glowing in the maturity of summer, lingering in the chilling 

 breath of autumn, and some few as daring even the frosts 

 of winter. They have been represented as sinking with 

 drought, weighed down with rain, and fading in the noon- 

 day sun ; as opening, fresh with dew, to the beauty of the 

 morning, and closing with the day ; as enlarged and im- 

 proved by the hand of art ; as dying, or growing rank and 

 wild, under the influence of neglect. 



How beautifully the poet says, in praying for the inspira- 

 tion of poesy, 



<( 'twill bring me to the fair 



Visions of all places : a bowery nook 

 Will be elysium an eternal book 

 Whence I may copy many a lovely saying 

 About the leaves and flowers ; about the playing 

 Of nymphs in woods and fountains ; and the shade 

 Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid ; 



