60 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN 



read them a hundred times has only begun 

 to discern their beauty. Keats and Shelley 

 loved them, and oh ! how they danced before 

 Wordsworth's adoring eyes ! 



To Swinburne they showed one of their 

 many sides before he wrote of one of them 



" Erect, a fighting flower, 

 It breasts the breeziest hour 

 That ever blew; 



For all the storm wind saith still, 

 Stout stands the daffodil." 



In a most appreciative study of the flower 

 the Rev. Hugh Macmillan wrote : " There is 

 no flower so vigorous and so full of life. It 

 has the strength and simplicity of a Doric 

 column. We have in this flower of March, 

 the beautiful combination of winter and 

 summer ; of the raincloud and the sunbeam ; 

 of the warmth of the sun in its bloom, and 

 the coolness and freshness of the floods in its 

 leaves : the whole plant being thus an expres- 

 sive symbol of the true elements that help to 

 make up its lovely life." 



We could follow it through the pages of 

 Tennyson, of the Rossettis, of de Vere, of Jean 

 Ingelow, of Mrs Ewing, of Austin Dobson, 



