301 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
teach us to be always children, to be ever fresh, and 
budding into new beauty; for the poetry of our lives is all 
that can ennoble us. It is in the morning of existence that 
“ Hope looks out 
Into the dazzling sheen, and fondly talks 
Of summer; and Love comes, and all the air 
Rings with wild harmonies.” 
Because time has led us a little further towards the 
tomb, we need not become so engrossed with sordid 
pm suits as to shun the world of beauty, the creation of 
poetry, which exists around us in the semblance of per¬ 
petual youth. Oh ! “ let the blood of the violet trickle 
in our veins/* Let us mingle with the sweet children 
of the woods, and hold communings with nature in her 
own peaceful solitudes. We will lie in green meads 
where daisies grow, and bask us in the sunshine; lie by 
the streamlet's brim, and plait rushes, and talk to our own 
images in the reflecting waters; hide in flowery nooks and 
dingles, and murmur snatches of wild old songs, until 
we laugh ourselves into a very incarnation of gladness 
we'll build our fairy palaces with a geometry of sun¬ 
beams, and climb upwards on our dreamy destiny till the 
universe becomes our temple. 
It was the love of flowers which gave to the pages of 
the old poets that freshness which is the true image of 
life. The wisdom of Solomon was so much the greater 
that he loved flowers; and it is the same sentiment which 
sweetens the pages of Spenser, Chaucer, Clare, Carring¬ 
ton, Gilbert White, and Chatterton, and makes them 
lustrous, like unclouded sunshine in the month of June. 
If we had not this love of flowers in our hearts, we 
