But this small flower, to Nature dear,
    While moons and stars their courses run,
    Wreathes the whole circle of the year,
    Companion of the sun.

    It smiles upon the lap of May,
    To sultry August spreads its charms,
    Lights pale October on his way,
    And twines December’s arms.

    The purple heath and golden broom,
    On moory mountains catch the gale,
    O’er lawns the lily sheds perfume,
    The violet in the vale.

    But this bold floweret climbs the hill,
    Hides in the forest, haunts the glen,
    Plays on the margin of the rill,
    Peeps round the fox’s den.

    Within the garden’s cultured round
    It shares the sweet carnation’s bed;
    And blooms on consecrated ground
    In honour of the dead.

    The lambkin crops its crimson gem,
    The wild-bee murmurs on its breast,
    The blue-fly bends its pensile stem,
    Light o’er the sky-lark’s nest.

    ’Tis FLORA’S page,—­in every place,
    In every season fresh and fair;
    It opens with perennial grace. 
    And blossoms everywhere.

    On waste and woodland, rock and plain,
    Its humble buds unheeded rise;
    The rose has but a summer-reign;
    The DAISY never dies.

James Montgomery.

Montgomery has another very pleasing poetical address to the daisy.  The poem was suggested by the first plant of the kind which had appeared in India.  The flower sprang up unexpectedly out of some English earth, sent with other seeds in it, to this country.  The amiable Dr. Carey of Serampore was the lucky recipient of the living treasure, and the poem is supposed to be addressed by him to the dear little flower of his home, thus born under a foreign sky.  Dr. Carey was a great lover of flowers, and it was one of his last directions on his death-bed, as I have already said, that his garden should be always protected from the intrusion of Goths and Vandals in the form of Bengallee goats and cows.  I must give one stanza of Montgomery’s second poetical tribute to the small flower with “the silver crest and golden eye.”

    Thrice-welcome, little English flower! 
    To this resplendent hemisphere
    Where Flora’s giant offsprings tower
    In gorgeous liveries all the year;
    Thou, only thou, art little here
    Like worth unfriended and unknown,
    Yet to my British heart more dear
    Than all the torrid zone.

It is difficult to exaggerate the feeling with which an exile welcomes a home-flower.  A year or two ago Dr. Ward informed the Royal Institution of London, that a single primrose had been taken to Australia in a glass-case and that when it arrived there in full bloom, the sensation it excited was so great that even those who were in the hot pursuit of gold, paused in their eager career to gaze for a moment upon the flower of their native fields, and such immense crowds at last pressed around it that it actually became necessary to protect it by a guard.