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THE INDICATOR.

There he arriving round about doth flie,
And takes survey with busie curious eye:
Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.

SPENSER.

No. XXVIII.-WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19th, 1820.

SPRING.-DAISIES.-GATHERING FLOWERS

THE Spring is now complete. The winds have done their work. The shaken air, well tempered and equalized, has subsided; the genial rains, however thickly they may come, do not saturate the ground, beyond the power of the sun to dry it up again. There are clear chrystal mornings; noons of blue sky and white cloud; nights, in which the growing moon seems to lie looking at the stars, like a young shepherdess at her flock. A few days ago she lay gazing in this manner at the solitary evening star, like Diana, on the slope of a valley, looking up at Endymion. His young eye seemed to sparkle out upon the world; while she, bending inwards, her, hands behind her head, watched him with an enamoured dumbness. But this is the quiet of Spring. It's voices and swift movements have come back also. The swallow shoots by us, like an embodied ardour of the season. The glowing bee has his will of the honied flowers, grappling with them as they tremble. We have not yet heard the nightingale or the cuckoo; but we can hear them with our imagination, and enjoy them through the content of those who have.

Then the young green. This is the most apt and perfect mark of the season, the true issuing forth of the Spring. The trees and bushes are putting forth their crisp fans; the lilac is loaded with bud; the meadows are thick with the bright young grass, running into sweeps of white and gold with the daisies and buttercups. The orchards announce their riches, in a shower of silver blossoms. The earth in fertile woods is spread with yellow and blue carpets of primroses, violets, and hyacinths, over which the birch-trees, like stooping nymphs, hang with their thickening hair. Lilies of the valley, stocks, columbines, lady-smocks, and the intensely red piony which seems to anticipate the full glow of summer-time, all come out to wait upon the season, like fairies from their subterraneous palaces.

Who is to wonder that the idea of love mingles itself with that of this cheerful and kind time of the year, setting aside even common

associations? It is not only it's youth, and beauty, and budding life, and "the passion of the groves," that exclaim with the poet,

Let those love now, who never loved before;

And those who always loved, now love the more*.

All our kindly impulses are apt to have more sentiment in them, than the world suspect; and it is by fetching out this sentiment, and making it the ruling association, that we exalt the impulse into generosity and refinement, instead of degrading it, as is too much the case, into what is selfish, and coarse, and pollutes all it's systems. One of the greatest inspirers of love is gratitude,-not merely on it's common grounds, but gratitude for pleasures, whether consciously or unconsciously, conferred. Thus we are thankful for the delight given us by a kind and sincere face; and if we fall in love with it, one great reason is, that we long to return what we have received. The same feeling has a considerable influence in the love that has been felt for men of talents, whose persons or address have not been much calculated to inspire it. In spring-time, joy awakens the heart: with joy, awakes gratitude and nature; and in our gratitude, we return, on it's own principle of participation, the love that has been shewn us.

This association of ideas renders solitude in spring, and solitude in winter, two very different things. In the latter, we are better con. tent to bear the feelings of the season by ourselves :-in the former they are so sweet as well as so overflowing, that we long to share them. Shakspeare, in one of his sonnets, describes himself as so identifying the beauties of the spring with the thought of his absent mistress, that he says he forgot them in their own character, and played with them only as with her shadow. See how exquisitely he turns a commonplace into this fancy; and what a noble brief portrait of April he gives us at the beginning. There is indeed a wonderful mixture of softness and strength in almost every one of the lines.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odour and in hue,

Could make me any summer's story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:

Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose:

They were but sweet, butt patterns of delight,

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

Yet seemed it winter still; and, you away,

As with your shadow, I with these did play.

Shakspeare was fond of alluding to April. He did not allow May to have all his regard, because she was richer. Perdita, crowned with flowers, in the Winter's Tale, is beautifully compared to

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There is a line in one of his sonnets, which, agreeably to the image he had in his mind, seems to strike up in one's face, hot and odorous, like perfume in a censer.

In process of the seasons have I seen

Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned.

His allusions to spring are numerous in proportion. We all know the song, containing that fine line, fresh from the most brilliant of pallets :

When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,

Do paint the meadows with delight.

We owe a long debt of gratitude to the daisy; and we take this opportunity of discharging a millionth part of it. If we undertook to pay it all, we should have had to write such a book, as is never very likely to be written, -a journal of numberless happy hours in childhood, kept with the feelings of an infant and the pen of a man. For it would take, we suspect, a depth of delight and a subtlety of words, to express even the vague joy of infancy, such as our learned departures from natural wisdom would find it more difficult to put together, than criticism and comfort, or an old palate and a young relish.But knowledge is the widening and the brightening road that must conduct us back to the joys from which it led us; and which it is destined perhaps to secure and extend. We must not quarrel with it's asperities, when we can help,

We do not know the Greek name of the daisy, nor do the dictionaries inform us; and we are not at present in the way of consulting books that might. We always like to see what the Greeks say to these things, because they had a sentiment in their enjoyments. The Latins called it Bellis or Bellus, as much as to say, Nice One. With the French and Italians it has the same name as a Pearl,-Marguerite, Margarita, or generally, by way of endearment, Margheretina*. The same word was the name of a woman, and occasioned infinite intermixtures of compliment about pearls, daisies, and fair mistresses, Chaucer, is his beautiful poem of the Flower and the Leaf, which is evidently imitated from some French poetess, says,

And at the laste there began anon

A lady for to sing right womanly

A bargarett in praising the daisie,

For as me thought among her notes sweet,
She said "Si douset est la Margarete."

"The Margaret is so sweet." Our Margaret however, in this allegorical poem, is undervalued in comparison with the laurel; yet Chaucer perhaps was partly induced to translate it on occount of it's making the figure that it does; for he has informed us more than once, in a

*This word is originally Greek,-Margarites; and as the Franks probably brought it from Constantinople, perhaps they brought it's association with the daisy also.

+ Bargaret, Bergerette, a little pastoral.

very particular manner, that it was his favourite flower. There is a very interesting passage to this effect in his Legend of Good Women; where he says, that nothing but the daisied fields in spring could take him from his books.

And as for me, though that I can✶ but lite*
On bookes for to read I me delight,
And to hem give I faith and full credence,
And in my heart have hem in reverence,
So heartily, that there is game none,
That from my bookès maketh me to gone,
But it be seldom, on the holy day;
Save certainly, when that the month of May
Is comen, and that I hear the foulès sing,
And that the flowers ginnen for to spring,
Farewell my booke, and my devotion.
Now have I then eke this condition,
That, of all the flowers in the mead,

Then love I most those flowers white and red,
Such that men callen daisies in our town.
To hem I have so great affection,

As I said erst, when comen is the May,
That in the bed there dawetht me no day,
That I nam up and walking in the mead,
To seen this flower agenst the sunne spread,
When it upriseth early by the morrow,
That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow.
So glad am I, when that I have presence
Of it, to done it all reverence,

As she that is of all flowers the flower.

He says that he finds it ever new, and that he shall love it till his "heart dies:" and afterwards, with a natural picture of his resting on the grass,

Adown full softely I gan to sink,

And leaning on my elbow and my side,
The long day I shopet me for to abide
For nothing else, and I shall not lie,
But for to look upon the daisie,

That well by reason men it call may

The daisie, or else the eye of day.

This etymology, which we have no doubt is the real one, is repeated by Ben Jonson, who takes occasion to spell the word days-eyes; adding, with his usual tendency to overdo a matter of learning,

Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows;

videlicet, cowslips: which is a disentanglement of compounds, in the style of our pleasant parodists:

-Puddings of the plum,

And fingers of the lady.

Mr. Wordsworth introduces his homage to the daisy with a passage from George Wither; which as it is an old favourite of ours, and extremely applicable both to this article and our whole work, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of repeating. It is the more interesting,

Know but little,

Dawneth.

Shaped.

inasmuch as it was written in prison, where the freedom of his opinions had thrown him*. He is speaking of his Muse, or Imagination.

Her divine skill taught me this;
That from every thing I saw
I could some instruction draw,
And raise pleasure to the height
From the meanest object's sight.
By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy, whose leaves spread
Shut, when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree;
She could more infuse in me,
Than all Nature's beauties can

In some other wiser man.

Mr. Wordsworth undertakes to patronize the Celandine, because nobody else will notice it; which is a good reason. But though he tells us, in a startling piece of information, that

Poets, vain men in their mood!

Travel with the multitude,

yet he falls in with his old brethren of England and Normandy, and becomes loyal to the daisy.

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It is not generally known, that Chaucer was four years in prison, in his old age, on the same account. He was a Wickliffite, one of the precursors of the Reformation. His prison, doubtless, was no diminisher of his love of the daisy.

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