THE DAISY OF THE DALE 
Old Age. 
Somehow the flowers seem different now, 
The Daisies dimmer than of old; 
There ’re fewer blossoms on the bough, 
The Hawthorn buds look grey and cold; 
The Pansies wore another dye 
When I was young — when I was young ; 
There’s not that blue about the sky 
Which every way in those days hung. 
There’s nothing now looks as it “ ought.” 
Said Time, “ The change is in thy thought.” 
THE STORY OF THE DAISY OF THE 
DALE. 
Beautiful are the fields of England powdered over with 
Daisies, as Chaucer happily termed it nearly five hundred 
years ago — those emblems of innocence — companions of 
the milk-white iambs — the first heavings of the awakening 
bosom of spring. Majestic are the remains of our old 
English forests, where around the battered and weather- 
beaten stems of the primitive oaks the broad, fan-like 
leaves of the Fern spread, showing how sincerely they 
still adhere to the ancient soil which first nourished them, 
and, that amid the great revolutions of departed ages, 
they still stand there — true but lowly emblems of Sincerity 
— marking out the spot where England’s mighty forests 
once spread. 
There it grew when the maned bison went thundering 
through the thick underwood, when the wolf made his 
lair at the foot of the primitive oak, and the tusked boar 
roamed free from the spear of the hunter. Ages before 
the son of Acadd came over the misty coean and called 
our island the Country of Sea-cliffs, the Fern grew broad 
and green as it does now. 
And in those solitudes, where human voice w^as then 
seldom heard, the tender and trembling Harebell grew, 
ever waving its delicate cups if the hushed wind but 
breathed in its sleep. Fitly was it named the Happiness 
of Retirement — the beauty of solitude — the graceful in- 
