There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near,"
And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear,"

And the lily whispers, "I wait."'

Talk, dear lady, of the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out! Please tell me, what would become of that poetry if you took out the flowers? and, companionable as love is, and able to make friends of stocks and stones and the vacant air, if you think the lover would have got along so confidentially with any inanimate objects but the flowers? He tells the lily that he is the happy man, and he knows it. He takes his oath of the same to the rose-adding a sarcasm at the sighs of the silly, sequacious peer. He borrows the soul of the rose, or, at least, allows it to enter his blood. With a passing allusion to the violets in the meadows (Maud's doing), and the indifference of the acacia and the sleepy pimpernel, he expresses his confidence in the wakeful sympathy of the queen of flowers and her sister. The roses and lilies were awake all night in expectation of the 'little head sunning over with curls.' The passion-flower dropped a conscious tear at her delay, and the larkspur caught the first sound of her step on the garden walk! Such is life-shared by the flowers-to a lover in the garden of his mistress.

After Love, the great fact of human story is death. And the mourner comes next to the lover, in his quick sense of companionship with the flowers. What would churchyards be without them? What tenderness, what patience, what suggestions of immortality, nay, of infinity, in the flowers! For have you not noticed that in all fine colour there is a hint of vanishing away-not a vanishing away into nothingness, but into infinity? A deep blue or green seems to me to have this quality more than any other colour; deep pink next. Only yesterday, I became utterly rapt over such a simple thing as a bed of larkspurs quite insensible of time, and space, and external things. It was, I think, but for a second, but God knoweth it might have been for ages. The same thing has happened, though more rarely, over a picture. It is a kind of moment that does not come often. But there is what a Frenchman would call a religiosité of feeling naturally attaching to the love of colour; and flowers are natural companions for us in our solemn mournful times, as well as when the pulse beats its highest, and the warm human life is itself breaking into flower.

It seems to me that we have lost something in the art of writing about flowers. There is a rich odorousness and fulness of colour about the old writers whenever they treat of them, which the moderns come far short of, so I fancy. Take Lord Bacon's Essay 'Of Gardening.' It is really quite delicious to read it. You see the flowers, their odour encompasses you, you tread the thyme, and admire the 'sweet Williams red.' It is luscious writing. The Keats school have only imperfectly imitated it. Keats is very rich and odorous sometimes, but rather in Cockney fashion. To read of that blanched linen smooth and laren

der'd' is as good as opening an old-fashioned housewife's chest of drawers on the sly. But let us hear my Lord Bacon! I scarcely know anything daintier than his discourses on housebuilding, gardening, and masks and triumphs :

And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air, where it comes and goes like the warbling of music, than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells, so that you may walk by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness; yea, though it be in a morning's dew. Bays, likewise, yield, no smell as they grow, rosemary little, nor sweet marjoram ; that which, above all others, yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet, especially the white double violet, which comes twice a-year, about the middle of April, and about Bartholomew-tide. Next to that is the musk-rose; then the strawberry leaves dying, with a most excellent cordial smell; then the flowers of the vines, it is a little dust like the dust of a bent which groweth upon the cluster in the first coming forth; then the sweetbriar, then wall-flowers, which are very delightful to be set under a parlour or lower chamber window; then pinks and gilliflowers, especially the matted pink, and clove gilliflower; then the flowers of the lime-tree; then the honeysuckles, so they be somewhat afar off. Of bean flowers I speak not, because they are field flowers; but those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three, that is burnet, wild thyme, and watermints; therefore, you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread. For the

heath, which was the third part of our plot, I wish it to be framed as much as may be to a natural wildness. Trees I would have none in it, but some thickets made only of sweetbriar and honeysuckle, and some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, strawberries, and primroses, for these are sweet and prosper in the shade; and these are to be in the heath here and there, not in any order. I like, also, little heaps, in the nature of mole-hills (such as are in wild heaths), to be set, some with wild thyme, some with pinks, some with germander, that gives a good flower to the eye; some with periwinkle; some with violets; some with strawberries; some with cowslips; some with daisies; some with red roses; some with lilium convallium; some with sweet Williams red; some with bear's foot-and the like low flowers, being withal sweet and sightly; part of which heaps to be with standards of little bushes pricked upon their top, and part without; the standards to be roses, juniper, holly, berberries (but here and there, because of the smell of their blossom), re i currants, gooseberry, rosemary, bays, sweetbriar, and such like; but these standards to be kept with cutting, that they grow not out of course.'

And, by the side of this prose, place one passage from Milton :

'Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips way, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears ;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffodillies fill the cup with tears,
To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies.'

And one from Shakespere :

'O, Proserpina,

For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett'st fall
From Dis's waggon! daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,

Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength; bold oxlips, and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,

The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack
To make you garlands of.'

We have no modern writing about flowers that breathes and blooms like this. Perhaps you will say we have no Miltons, Shakesperes, and Bacons. But, if any man could have written perfectly about flowers, it should surely have been the delicate Shelley. I fancy, however, he has not done so. Read these verses, immortally beautiful, but not such a nosegay of words as some of the fifth-rate Élizabethan poets give you, and as some moderns vainly think to reproduce by the free use of such words as 'rathe,' 'lush,' &c. :

'A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

And the spring arose on that garden fair,
And the Spirit of Love fell everywhere;
And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss

In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,

Like a doe in the noon-tide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

The snowdrop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground, with warm rain wet,

And their breath was mixed with fresh odour sent
From the turf, like the voice and instrument.

Then the pied wind-flowers and tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;

And the Naiad-like lily of the vale
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;

And the hyacinth, purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;

And the rose, like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Which unveiled the depths of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air,
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare;

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Monad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,

Gazed through the clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows,
And all rare blossoms from every clime,
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.'

I own, indeed, that I would rather read those verses than go to a nursery or to Kew. I hate a nursery; I hate Kew. I hate a flowerfancier. I am not a flower-fancier, I am a flower-lover. What do I care for double-dahlias, and prize stocks, and hydrangias turned blue by a chemical solution? I would rather see a heath-bell, or a forgetme-not, than the finest flower florist ever produced, if he brought it to me with a label, express or implied, round its neck. A flowershow is my abhorrence. I know this is absurd. I know that the principle of the nursery is implied in the garden, and even in the flower-pot. But, with all my love for flowers, I have, I fear, a lurking prejudice against even gardens-I am sure I have against flowerpots. I should prefer it, if roses and lilies grew wild everywhere. Botany as a science is my horror. Also, I don't like your outlandish flowers. A cactus, now, is my aversion, however fine. What right had anybody to fetch it away from where it was? I saw a man in Fetter-lane the other day, selling large water-lilies. Poor, desolate, naked flowers that they looked, transplanted from the element which was their very raison d'être and their peculiar beauty! I would rather have seen a thistle or a marsh-mallow in flower; the purple of the thistle is, indeed, a very especial favourite of mine.

I think, among the cants that are canted about flowers, too much is said of the fondness of children for them. I do not observe that children are madly given to 'buttercups and daisies,' though poets and painters make it out so. What children do like is to trample down a garden-bed, and pick the flowers they are expressly told to leave alone. But that there is something childlike about flowers is most true. They live and take no thought. Emblems not only of the little ones, but of rare, happy Children of the Kingdom

souls found here and there,
Oases in the waste of sin,
Where everything is well and fair,
And God remits his discipline;
Whose sweet subdual of the world
The worldling scarce can recognise,
And ridicule against it hurl'd,

Drops with a broken sting and dies.

Who live by law, not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them, not bonds, but wings;
Who shine like Moses in the face,

And teach our hearts, without the rod,
That God's grace is the only grace,

And all grace is the grace of God.

Happy, happy souls, and rare as happy! And none can tell how blessed in themselves, and in the work they do. We can love and learn as they move shining onward, but the most of us can only take up the flower-life as an emblem, in a mitigated strain:

'How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returus, e'en as the flower in spring;
To which, beside their own demean,

The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away,

Like snow in May,

As if there were no such cold thing.

We have received this volume of poems too late in the month for any, extended notice, but it is better to say at once the words of welcome that rise to our pen than to delay. We can scarcely, perhaps, deal adequately, can scarcely deal fairly, with four hundred pages of poetry

Poems,' by George Mac Donald, author of Within and Without,' a Dramatic Poem. Longman. 1857.