Yet let me find these daughters of the early year in their native haunts, scattered about on hillside and in woody dingle, half hidden by green leaves, starting up like fairies in secluded nooks, nestling at the root of some old tree, or leaning over to peep into some glassy bit of water, and no heart thrills quicker than mine at the sight.  There they seem to me to enjoy a sweet wild life of their own; nodding and smiling in the sunshine or verdant gloom, caring not to see or to be seen.  Some of the loveliest of my early recollections are of rambles after flowers.  There was a certain “little pink and yellow flower” (so described to me by one of my young cousins) after which I searched a whole summer with unabated eagerness.  I was fairly haunted by its ideal image.  Henry von Ofterdingen never sought with intenser desire for his wondrous blue flower, nor more vainly; for I never found it.  One day, this same cousin and myself, while wandering in the woods, found ourselves on the summit of a little rocky precipice, and at its foot, lo! in full bloom, a splendid variety of the orchis, (a flower I had never seen before,) looking to my astonished eyes like an enchanted princess in a fairy tale.  With a scream of joy we both sprang for the prize.  Harriet seized it first, but after gazing at it a moment with a quiet smile, presented it to me.  “Kings may be blest, but I was glorious!” I never felt so rich before or since.

But there was one flower,—­and I must confess that I made acquaintance with it in a garden, but at an age when I thought all things grew out of the blessed earth of their own sweet will,—­which, as it is the first I remember to have loved, has maintained the right of priority in my affections to this day.  Nay, many an object of deep, absorbing interest, more than one glowing friendship, has meantime passed away, leaving no memorial but sad and bitter thoughts; while this wee flower still lives and makes glad a little green nook in my heart.  It was a Button-Rose of the smallest species, the outspread blossom scarce exceeding in size a shilling-piece.  It stood in my grandfather’s garden,—­that garden which, at my first sight of it, (I was then about five years old,) seemed to me boundless in extent, and beautiful beyond aught that I had seen or thought before.  It was a large, old-fashioned kitchen-garden, adorned and enriched, however, as then the custom was, with flowers and fruit-trees.  Several fine old pear-trees and a few of the choicest varieties of plum and cherry were scattered over it; currants and gooseberries lined the fences; the main alley, running through its whole extent, was thickly bordered by lilacs, syringas, and roses, with many showy flowers intermixed, and terminated in a very pleasant grape-arbor.  Behind this rose a steep green hill covered with an apple-orchard, through which a little thread of a footpath wound up to another arbor which stood on the summit relieved against the sky.  It was but little