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 fapsnw 
would be there to greet him with a silent welcome, 
as they did in the days of old when he went forth Sir to 
to listen to the song of the nightingale. And those feme gla 
Boses which, between the wars of the rival houses besth. 
of York and Lancaster, caused blood enough to be power: 1 
spilt to make the white for ever red, would be found down,be 
blowing, as peacefully in a few old gardens, as if the aid ton 
blast of war had never been heard in the world; oarethT 
bearing about them no trace of the strife and the tkose wl 
struggle, which the grave has for ever hushed, nor teeth 
a mark of the finger of Time upon the unsullied citiesai 
bloom of their buds. Nor could the eye that then tomthi 
