16 INTRODUCTION. 
Ere from the garden, man’s first abode, 
The glorious guests were gone. 
So might the days have been brightly told — 
Those days of song and dreams — 
When shepherds gathered their flocks of old, 
By the blue Arcadian streams. 
So in those isles of delight, that rest 
Far off in a breezeless main, 
Which many a bark, with a weary quest, 
Has sought, but still in vain. 
Yet is not life, in its real flight, 
Marked thus — even thus — on earth, 
By the closing of one hope’s delight, 
And another’s gentle birth ? 
Oh ! let us live, so that flower by flower, 
Shutting in turn, may leave 
A lingerer still for the sunset hour, 
A charm for the shaded eve. 
And among other poets, we often meet with 
floral dials. 
allusions to 
The dial hid by weeds and flowers, 
Hath told, by none beheld, the solitary hours. 
Wilson. 
Young Joy ne’er thought of counting hours, 
’Till Care, one summer’s morning, 
Set up, among his smiling flowers, 
A dial by way of warning. 
Murray. 
What a wide field for the imagination is displayed in the 
succeeding quotation from Hartley Coleridge. We might fancy 
ourselves luxuriating in a garden of roses, where “ every flower 
that blows” would add to our felicity; where the most agree- 
