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 a Marguerite (_the pearl_) d'Helicon."
The country maidens in England practise a kind of sortilege 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.
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