Pansies, Lilies, Kingcups, Daisies,
    Let them live upon their praises;
    Long as there’s a sun that sets
    Primroses will have their glory;
    Long as there are Violets,
    They will have a place in story: 
    There’s a flower that shall be mine,
    ’Tis the little Celandine.

No flower is too lowly for the affections of Wordsworth.  Hazlitt says, “the daisy looks up to Wordsworth with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance; a withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections; and even the lichens on the rocks have a life and being in his thoughts.”

The Lesser Celandine, is an inodorous plant, but as Wordsworth possessed not the sense of smell, to him a deficiency of fragrance in a flower formed no objection to it.  Miss Martineau alludes to a newspaper report that on one occasion the poet suddenly found himself capable of enjoying the fragrance of a flower, and gave way to an emotion of tumultuous rapture.  But I have seen this contradicted.  Miss Martineau herself has generally no sense of smell, but we have her own testimony to the fact that a brief enjoyment of the faculty once actually occurred to her.  In her case there was a simultaneous awakening of two dormant faculties—­the sense of smell and the sense of taste.  Once and once only, she enjoyed the scent of a bottle of Eau de Cologne and the taste of meat.  The two senses died away again almost in their birth.

Shelley calls Daisies “those pearled Arcturi of the earth”—­“the constellated flower that never sets.”

The Father of English poets does high honor to this star of the meadow in the “Prologue to the Legend of Goode Women.”

He tells us that in the merry month of May he was wont to quit even his beloved books to look upon the fresh morning daisy.

    Of all the floures in the mede
    Then love I most these floures white and red,
    Such that men callen Daisies in our town,
    To them I have so great affection. 
    As I sayd erst, when comen is the Maie,
    That in my bedde there dawneth me no daie
    That I nam up and walking in the mede
    To see this floure agenst the Sunne sprede,
    When it up riseth early by the morrow
    That blisfull sight softeneth all my sorrow.

Chaucer.

The poet then goes on with his hearty laudation of this lilliputian luminary of the fields, and hesitates not to describe it as “of all floures the floure.”  The famous Scottish Peasant loved it just as truly, and did it equal honor.  Who that has once read, can ever forget his harmonious and pathetic address to a mountain daisy on turning it up with the plough?  I must give the poem a place here, though it must be familiar to every reader.  But we can read it again and again, just as we can look day after day with undiminished interest upon the flower that it commemorates.

Mrs. Stowe (the American writer) observes that “the daisy with its wide plaited ruff and yellow centre is not our (that is, an American’s) flower.  The English flower is the