The Daisy--the miniature sun with its tiny rays--is especially the
favorite of our earliest years. In our remembrances of the happy meadows
in which we played in childhood, the daisy's silver lustre is ever
connected with the deeper radiance of its gay companion, the butter-cup,
which when held against the dimple on the cheek or chin of beauty turns
it into a little golden dell. The thoughtful and sensitive frequenter of
rural scenes discovers beauty every where; though it is not always the
sort of beauty that would satisfy the taste of men who recognize no
gaiety or loveliness beyond the walls of cities. To the poet's eye even
the freckles on a milk-maid's brow are not without a grace, associated
as they are with health, and the open sunshine.
Chaucer tells us that the French call the Daisy La belle Marguerite.
There is a little anecdote connected with the appellation. Marguerite of
Scotland, the Queen of Louis the Eleventh, presented Marguerite Clotilde
de Surville, a poetess, with a bouquet of daisies, with this
inscription; "Marguerite d'Ecosse à Marguerite (the pearl) d'Helicon."
The country maidens in England practise a kind of sortilége with this
flower. They pluck off leaf by leaf, saying alternately "He loves me"
and "He loves me not." The omen or oracle is decided by the fall of
either sentence on the last leaf.
It is extremely difficult to rear the daisy in India. It is accustomed
to all weathers in England, but the long continued sultriness of this
clime makes it as delicate as a languid English lady in a tropical
exile, and however carefully and skilfully nursed, it generally pines
for its native air and dies.[088]
THE PRICKLY GORSE.
--Yon swelling downs where the sweet air stirs
The harebells, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.
Keat's Endymion.
Fair maidens, I'll sing you a song,
I'll tell of the bonny wild flower,
Whose blossoms so yellow, and branches so long,
O'er moor and o'er rough rocky mountains are flung
Far away from trim garden and bower
L.A. Tuamley.
The PRICKLY GORSE or Goss or Furze, (ulex)[089] I cannot omit to
notice, because it was the plant which of all others most struck
Dillenius when he first trod on English ground. He threw himself on his
knees and thanked Heaven that he had lived to see the golden undulation
of acres of wind-waved gorse. Linnaeus lamented that he could scarcely
keep it alive in Sweden even in a greenhouse.
I have the most delightful associations connected with this plant, and
never think of it without a summer feeling and a crowd of delightful
images and remembrances of rural quietude and blue skies and balmy
breezes. Cowper hardly does it justice:
The common, over-grown with fern, and rough
With prickly gorse, that shapeless and deformed
And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom
And decks itself with ornaments of gold,
Yields no unpleasing ramble.
The plant is indeed irregularly shaped, but it is not deformed, and if
it is dangerous to the touch, so also is the rose, unless it be of that
species which Milton places in Paradise--"and without thorns the
rose."
Hurdis is more complimentary and more just to the richest ornament of
the swelling hill and the level moor.
And what more noble than the vernal furze
With golden caskets hung?
I have seen whole cotees or coteaux (sides of hills) in the sweet
little island of Jersey thickly mantled with the golden radiance of this
beautiful wildflower. The whole Vallée des Vaux (the valley of
vallies) is sometimes alive with its lustre.
VALLEE DES VAUX.
AIR--THE MEETING OF THE WATERS.
If I dream of the past, at fair Fancy's command,
Up-floats from the blue sea thy small sunny land!
O'er thy green hills, sweet Jersey, the fresh breezes blow,
And silent and warm is the Vallée des Vaux!
There alone have I loitered 'mid blossoms of gold,
And forgot that the great world was crowded and cold,
Nor believed that a land of enchantment could show
A vale more divine than the Vallée des Vaux.
A few scattered cots, like white clouds in the sky,
Or like still sails at sea when the light breezes die,
And a mill with its wheel in the brook's silver glow,
Form thy beautiful hamlet, sweet Vallée des Vaux!
As the brook prattled by like an infant at play,
And each wave as it passed stole a moment away,
I thought how serenely a long life would flow,
By the sweet little brook in the Vallée des Vaux.
D.L.R.
Jersey is not the only one of the Channel Islands that is enriched with
"blossoms of gold." In the sister island of Guernsey the prickly gorse
is much used for hedges, and Sir George Head remarks that the premises
of a Guernsey farmer are thus as impregnably fortified and secured as if
his grounds were surrounded by a stone wall. In the Isle of Man the
furze grows so high that it is sometimes more like a fir tree than the
ordinary plant.
There is an old proverb:--"When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out
of fashion"--that is never. The gorse blooms all the year.
FERN.
I'll seek the shaggy fern-clad hill
And watch, 'mid murmurs muttering stern,
The seed departing from the fern
Ere wakeful demons can convey
The wonder-working charm away.
Leyden.
"The green and graceful Fern" (filices) with its exquisite tracery
must not be overlooked. It recalls many noble home-scenes to British
eyes. Pliny says that "of ferns there are two kinds, and they bear
neither flowers nor seed." And this erroneous notion of the fern bearing
no seed was common amongst the English even so late as the time of
Addison who ridicules "a Doctor that had arrived at the knowledge of the
green and red dragon, and had discovered the female fern-seed." The
seed is very minute and might easily escape a careless eye. In the
present day every one knows that the seed of the fern lies on the under
side of the leaves, and a single leaf will often bear some millions of
seeds. Even those amongst the vulgar who believed the plant bore seed,
had an idea that the seeds were visible only at certain mysterious
seasons and to favored individuals who by carrying a quantity of it on
their person, were able, like those who wore the helmet of Pluto or the
ring of Gyges, to walk unseen amidst a crowd. The seed was supposed to
be best seen at a certain hour of the night on which St. John the
Baptist was born.
We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible,
Shakespeare's Henry IV. Part I.
In Beaumont's and Fletcher's Fair Maid of the Inn, is the following
allusion to the fern.
--Had you Gyges' ring,
Or the herb that gives invisibility.
Ben Jonson makes a similar allusion to it:
I had
No medicine, sir, to go invisible,
No fern-seed in my pocket.
Pope puts a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (Asplenium
trichomanes) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from evil
influences in the Cave of Spleen.
Safe passed the gnome through this fantastic band
A branch of healing spleen-wort in his hand.
The fern forms a splendid ornament for shadowy nooks and grottoes, or
fragments of ruins, or heaps of stones, or the odd corners of a large
garden or pleasure-ground.
I have had many delightful associations with this plant both at home and
abroad. When I visited the beautiful Island of Penang, Sir William
Norris, then the Recorder of the Island, and who was a most
indefatigable collector of ferns, obligingly presented me with a
specimen of every variety that he had discovered in the hills and
vallies of that small paradise; and I suppose that in no part of the
world could a finer collection of specimens of the fern be made for a
botanist's herbarium. Fern leaves will look almost as well ten years
after they are gathered as on the day on which they are transferred from
the dewy hillside to the dry pages of a book.
Jersey and Penang are the two loveliest islands on a small scale that I
have yet seen: the latter is the most romantic of the two and has nobler
trees and a richer soil and a brighter sky--but they are both charming
retreats for the lovers of peace and nature. As I have devoted some
verses to Jersey I must have some also on
THE ISLAND OF PENANG.
I.
I stand upon the mountain's brow--
I drink the cool fresh, mountain breeze--
I see thy little town below,[090]
Thy villas, hedge-rows, fields and trees,
And hail thee with exultant glow,
GEM OF THE ORIENTAL SEAS!
II.
A cloud had settled on my heart--
My frame had borne perpetual pain--
I yearned and panted to depart
From dread Bengala's sultry plain--
Fate smiled,--Disease withholds his dart--
I breathe the breath of life again!
III.
With lightened heart, elastic tread,
Almost with youth's rekindled flame,
I roam where loveliest scenes outspread
Raise thoughts and visions none could name,
Save those on whom the Muses shed
A spell, a dower of deathless fame.
IV.
I feel, but oh! could ne'er pourtray,
Sweet Isle! thy charms of land and wave,
The bowers that own no winter day,
The brooks where timid wild birds lave,
The forest hills where insects gay[091]
Mimic the music of the brave!
V.
I see from this proud airy height
A lovely Lilliput below!
Ships, roads, groves, gardens, mansions white,
And trees in trimly ordered row,[092]
Present almost a toy like sight,
A miniature scene, a fairy show!
VI.
But lo! beyond the ocean stream,
That like a sheet of silver lies,
As glorious as a poet's dream
The grand Malayan mountains rise,
And while their sides in sunlight beam
Their dim heads mingle with the skies.
VI.
Men laugh at bards who live in clouds--
The clouds beneath me gather now,
Or gliding slow in solemn crowds,
Or singly, touched with sunny glow,
Like mystic shapes in snowy shrouds,
Or lucid veils on Beauty's brow.
VIII.
While all around the wandering eye
Beholds enchantments rich and rare,
Of wood, and water, earth, and sky
A panoramic vision fair,
The dyal breathes his liquid sigh,
And magic floats upon the air!
IX.
Oh! lovely and romantic Isle!
How cold the heart thou couldst not please!
Thy very dwellings seem to smile
Like quiet nests mid summer trees!
I leave thy shores--but weep the while--
GEM OF THE ORIENTAL SEAS!
D.L.R.
HENNA.
The henna or al hinna (Lawsonia inermis) is found in great abundance
in Egypt, India, Persia and Arabia. In Bengal it goes by the name of
Mindee. It is much used here for garden hedges. Hindu females rub it
on the palms of their hands, the tips of their fingers and the soles of
their feet to give them a red dye. The same red dye has been observed
upon the nails of Egyptian mummies. In Egypt sprigs of henna are hawked
about the streets for sale with the cry of "O, odours of Paradise; O,
flowers of the henna!" Thomas Moore alludes to one of the uses of the
henna:--
Thus some bring leaves of henna to imbue
The fingers' ends of a bright roseate hue,
So bright, that in the mirror's depth they seem
Like tips of coral branches in the stream.
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