4 6 
The Poetry of Flowers . 
The butterflies come aping 
Those fine thieves of ours, 
And flutter round our rifled tops, like tickled flowers 
with flowers. 
See those tops, how beauteous ! 
What fair service duteous 
Round some idol waits, as on their lord the Nine 
Elfin court ’twould seem ; 
And taught, perchance, that dream 
Which the old Greek mountain dreamt, upon nights 
divine. 
To expound such wonder 
Human speech avails not; 
Yet there dies no poorest weed that such a glory 
exhales not. 
Think of all these treasures, 
Matchless works and pleasures, 
Every one a marvel, more than thought can say ; 
Then think in what bright showers 
We thicken fields and bowers, 
And with what heaps of sweetness half-stifle wanton 
May ; 
Think of the mossy forests 
By the bee-birds haunted, 
And all those Amazonian plains, lone lying as en¬ 
chanted. 
Trees themselves are ours ; 
Fruits are born of flowers ; 
Peach, and roughest nut, were blossoms in the spring ; 
The lusty bee knows well 
The news, and comes pell-mell, 
And dances in the gloomy thicks with darksome 
antheming. 
