To them, he says, he has so great an affection that in this month of May the day never dawns upon his bed that he is not up and walking in the meadow to see this flower spreading itself against the sun; its rising is such a blissful sight that it dispels all his sorrow; he offers to it his greatest reverence, and his love is so hot that when evening comes he runs forth to see how it will go to rest; and, he adds— Allas, that I ne had Englyssh, ryme, or prose, And doune on knees anoon ryght I me sette, Upon the smale, softe, swote gras. Chaucer, as I have said, connects the daisy with the month of May: Shakspere makes it an April flower. In 'Lucrece' there is this exquisite image: Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet; whose perfect white And in the song which concludes the play of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' the white and red of the flower is alluded to: Daisies pied and violets blue And lady-smocks all silver-white. In 'L'Allegro' Milton uses Shakspere's phrase: Meadows trim, with daisies pied; and in 'Comus' he speaks of the daisies, not the meadows, being 'trim The wood nymphs, decked with daisies trim. This last expression is quite accurate, for the flower is neat and trim even to demureness, especially if we take it in bud, when the little yellow centre is surrounded by a circlet of crimson, and that again by a ring of white, each being pressed closely upon the other. The anthology of the daisy would be very incomplete without Herrick's felicitous contribution. His little poem is based upon what I have already alluded to the daisy's habit of folding itself up early for the night : Shut not so soon; the dull-ey'd night Ha's not as yet begunne To make a seisure on the light, Or to seale up the sun. No marigolds yet closed are, No shadowes great appeare; Nor doth the early shepheard's starre Shine like a spangle here. Stay but till my Julia close Her life-begetting eye ; And let the whole world then dispose It selfe to live or dye. There is one line of Burns, which has made immortal that mountain daisy which he turned down with his plough in April 1786. It is the first and the best line in his poem :— Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower. I must not omit Shelley's accurate and beautiful description of the flower : Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth The constellated flower that never sets. Wordsworth, who desired to bring back to the flower its long-lost praise '-the praise which, he says, it had in Chaucer's time-wrote many poems on the daisy. With him it was the 'cheerful flower,' the 'poet's darling,' the child of the year,' and 'nature's favourite;' but the lines of his on this subject which will be longest remembered are these: Sweet silent creature! That breath'st with me in sun and air, During the last few days we have had perfect April weather-a warm temperature, with sun, wind, and rain alternate and commingled. The throstle's nest in the ivy has now three eggs in it; and the hen is sitting closely. The first egg, as I mentioned last week, was laid on the ninth, the other two were laid each morning of the two following days, and then the incubation began. The pear-blossom on the southerly wall of the house is now white and fully opened; but that which is in the orchard is still only half unfolded, and is tipped with red. Twice in the year the thorns are supremely beautiful; once when the vivid green is all outspread, and yet has not lost its freshness; and again when the green is hidden by the profuse and snowy flower. The first of these stages has now been reached, and on some trees the blossom is just beginning to form itself. XV.-ON THE MOORLAND. April 24. WHEN the wind is easterly here, we have always one compensation-we can see the hills. Under ordinary conditions the last thing we should expect to discover would be a blue line of upland on the horizon; but if the wind is with the sun-rising, and if it should also happen to be a day on which the ejection of smoke is less than usual, then a stranger would be startled by the nearness and distinctness of the hill-country. The range runs from east to southeast. It begins in Yorkshire with a craggy peak overlooking the vale of Saddleworth, it just touches F Lancashire, crosses a narrow tongue of Cheshire, and finishes in Derbyshire with the great buttress of Kinder Scout. To many people in the South of England it is a subject of wonder why we in the North should make so little use of this grand recreation ground. We often run much further afield and fare considerably worse. If Wordsworth or Scott had written about it as they have done about their own neighbourhoods, what a change we should have seen! Standing in my own garden I can always feel the breath of the hills-cold, perhaps, and often touched by the smoke of intervening towns, but never other than refreshing-and a walk of six or seven miles across country will take me at any time into their wildest and most unfrequented solitudes. By the railways, too, the edge of any part of the region may be reached in less than an hour. This rapidity of access is not unimportant, for the more quickly we can change our habitual surrounding the more beneficial is the effect on the mind. As often as we have opportunity, therefore, we escape to the hills. It was not an encouraging morning when, a day or two ago, we started for Hayfield, with intention to cross into Edale, the most secluded of the Derbyshire valleys. The rain fell persistently; but still we had hopes of |