The lambkin crops its crimson gem,
The wild-bee murmurs on its breast,
The blue-fly bends its pensile stem,
Light o'er the sky-lark's nest.
'Tis FLORA'S page,--in every place,
In every season fresh and fair;
It opens with perennial grace.
And blossoms everywhere.
On waste and woodland, rock and plain,
Its humble buds unheeded rise;
The rose has but a summer-reign;
The DAISY never dies.
_James Montgomery_.
Montgomery has another very pleasing poetical address to the daisy. The
poem was suggested by the first plant of the kind which had appeared in
India. The flower sprang up unexpectedly out of some English earth, sent
with other seeds in it, to this country. The amiable Dr. Carey of
Serampore was the lucky recipient of the living treasure, and the poem
is supposed to be addressed by him to the dear little flower of his
home, thus born under a foreign sky. Dr. Carey was a great lover of
flowers, and it was one of his last directions on his death-bed, as I
have already said, that his garden should be always protected from the
intrusion of Goths and Vandals in the form of Bengallee goats and cows.
I must give one stanza of Montgomery's second poetical tribute to the
small flower with "the silver crest and golden eye."
Thrice-welcome, little English flower!
To this resplendent hemisphere
Where Flora's giant offsprings tower
In gorgeous liveries all the year;
Thou, only thou, art little here
Like worth unfriended and unknown,
Yet to my British heart more dear
Than all the torrid zone.
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