THE DAFFODIL— continued. 
the feelings they arouse in our minds are mostly joyous. After the gloom of 
winter, March is Tennyson’s 
“ roaring moon of daffodil and crocus ” ; 
and it would seem a somewhat morbid fancy that will say, with Herrick, 
“ When a daffadill I see 
Hanging down his head t’wards me, 
Guesse I may, what I must be : 
First, I shall decline my head j 
Secondly, I shall be dead ; 
Lastly, safely buryed.” 
To most of us, as to Keats 
“ A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, 
Its loveliness increases, it will never 
Pass into nothingness” .... 
“and such are daffodils 
With the green world they live in.” 
The manifold corruptions of such pretty popular names as “ Lent Lily ” into 
“ Lantern Lily,” and the apparent mingling of Daffodil and Saffron Lily into 
“ Daffadowndilly,” point, like the playfulness of the French “ Jeannette jaune,” 
to the far-back appreciation of the beauty of this wild favourite. There is but 
little in common between the merely intellectual pleasure of a “ rare find ” and 
the glee with which we are filled by the sight of such Spring beauty, however 
familiar it may be. It is a time for poetry rather than for science, and every line of 
Wordsworth’s enthusiasm finds an echo in our own. 
“I wander’d lonely as a cloud 
That floats on high o’er vales and hills, 
When all at once I saw a crowd, 
A host of golden daffodils, 
Beside the lake beneath the trees 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 
“ Continuous as the stars that shine 
And twinkle on the milky-way. 
They stretched in never-ending line 
Along the margin of a bay ; 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 
“ The waves beside them danced, but they 
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee : — 
A poet could not but be gay 
In such a jocund company ! 
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought ; 
“ For oft, when on my couch I lie 
In vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude ; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils.” 
Among the distinctive characters of the wild Daffodil we can merely note the 
slightly keeled, sub-glaucous, and blunt leaves ; the large very shortly stalked 
solitary flower, drooping slightly, in the axil of a pointed membranous spathe, at the 
summit of a peduncle less than a foot in height ; and the pleasingly contrasted pale 
yellow pointed perianth-segments and deep golden funnel-shaped coronet equalling 
them in length, and with recurved margin slightly notched into six rectangular 
lobings. The latest view as to the morphological nature of this coronet, free as it 
appears of all union with the six included stamens, is that it represents twelve united 
stipular appendages to the stamens. 
