168 
LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS. 
summer, saving the altered hedgerow, and the rustic 
stile, they would behold no change : the Crocus, and 
the Cowslip, the Bluebell, Buttercup, and Daisy, 
would stand dreaming among the green grass, as 
they did a thousand years ago ; the hoary Hawthorn 
would throw out as sweet a fragrance, and the 
hidden Violet betray the bed where its blue sisters 
slept, by the delicacy of its unaltered perfume: for 
Time has not left a trace of his footmarks upon the 
flowers. The same sunshine which lighted up the 
silver of the Daisy, and deepened the pale gold of 
the Primrose, when Chaucer went forth to do “ ob¬ 
servance to the May,” sleeps upon them in the 
sweet spring-time of our own days; and although 
the Poet would find no traces of the castles in which 
he was ever a welcome guest, his favourite flowers 
would be there to greet him with a silent welcome, 
as they did in the days of old when he went forth 
to listen to the song of the nightingale. And those 
Roses which, between the wars of the rival houses 
of York and Lancaster, caused blood enough to be 
spilt to make the white for ever red, would be found 
blowing, as peacefully in a few old gardens, as if the 
blast of war had never been heard in the world; 
bearing about them no trace of the strife and the 
struggle, which the grave has for ever hushed, nor 
a mark of the finger of Time upon the unsullied 
bloom of their buds. Nor could the eye that then 
