On some occasions it has been necessary not only to cast aside the hedge-flowers of poetry, but also to 
pass by the roses. Even Chaucer, so copious are his praises of some of his favourite flowers, we could not 
venture to quote so insatiably as inclination would lead us. Most of our best poets have touched upon the 
beauty of flowers, more or less : — Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakspeare, the great poetic luminaries of 
our island, 
“ the sages 
Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages,” 
have all dwelt largely on them. Ben Jonson, too, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Drayton, Dryden, Thom- 
son, Cowper, &c. In our own times, Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, Hunt, Keats, Scott, Montgomery, 
Cornwall, and Clare, have revelled in them like bees. It has been remarked as a defect in Pope, that he 
says little or nothing, in his poems, of the works of nature ; and it does appear an extraordinary thing 
in a poet, so tremblingly alive to beauty in every shape as poets naturally are, and necessarily must be. 
Pope was a poet for the drawing-room ; but there are few even among ungifted individuals totally insensible 
to the soothing influence of flowers and trees : — 
“ The enamelled earth, that from her verdant breast 
Lavished spontaneously ambrosial flowers, 
The very sight of which can soothe to rest 
A thousand cares, and charm our sweetest hours.” 
Garcilasso. 
“ This lucid fount, whose murmurs fill the mind, 
The verdant forests waving with the wind, 
The odours wafted from the mead, the flowers 
In which the wild bee sits and sings for hours ; 
These might the moodiest misanthrope employ, 
Make sound the sick, and turn distress to joy.” Ibid. t 
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 actually before his eye. Thus flowers have 
been described in all their seasons, and in every variety of situation and circumstance, 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 improved 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 inspiration 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 ; 
And many a verse from so strange influence, 
That we must ever wonder how and whence 
It came ! ” Keats. 
The spring is, in particular, a subject delightful to the poet. He loves to celebrate the cheerful season when 
“The palms put forth her gems, and every tree 
Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.” Herrick. 
“ As spring, attended by the laughing hours, 
After long storm is wont to re-appear, 
When the mild zephyr, breathing through the bowers, 
Bring back its former beauty to the year, 
And goes enamelling the banks with flowers, 
Blue, white, and red, all eye* and hearts to cheer.” Wiffen’s Garcij.asso. 
