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And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,
With its dark buds and leaves wandering astray;
And flowers azure, black and streaked with gold,
Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.
We find Shelley, too, lavishing words of praise and fondness on the daisy. How exquisitely descriptive is the epithet "pearled Arcturi of the earth, the constellated flower that never sets;" the association of true and beautiful ideas is the happiest that can be conceived in so few words. The pearl-like whiteness of the flower; the name "Arcturi," from the star Arcturus, which is always visible to our hemisphere, as the daisy is ever in bloom; and the term "constellated flower," so beautifully realizing the starry groups in which they are seen clustering together, are ideas as truly as they are poetically emblematical of the subject.
Primroses and cowslips have ever been in high favour with the sovereigns of song. The Swedish name of the former, majnycklar, or the key of May, is very characteristic of the sudden arrival of Summer in high latitudes. The primrose comes, and, as if it unlocked the treasure-house of earth, all the other bright gifts of the season follow close upon it. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Bridal Song of Theseus and Hippolita, we find among "Natures children sweet,"
Primrose, first-born child of Ver,
Merry Spring-time's harbinger,
With her bells dim.
And Herrick celebrates their meek, young beauty in one of his most musical, melancholy strains:
