My last poetical tribute to the Daisy shall be three stanzas from Wordsworth, from two different addresses to the same flower.

With little here to do or see
Of things that in the great world be,
Sweet Daisy! oft I talk to thee,
For thou art worthy,
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which Love makes for thee!

* * * * *

If stately passions in me burn,
And one chance look to Thee should turn,
I drink out of an humbler urn
A lowlier pleasure;
The homely sympathy that heeds
The common life, our nature breeds;
A wisdom fitted to the needs
Of hearts at leisure.

When, smitten by the morning ray,
I see thee rise, alert and gay,
Then, cheerful Flower! my spirits play
With kindred gladness;
And when, at dusk, by dews opprest
Thou sink’st, the image of thy rest
Hath often eased my pensive breast
Of careful sadness.

It is peculiarly interesting to observe how the profoundest depths of thought and feeling are sometimes stirred in the heart of genius by the smallest of the works of Nature.  Even more ordinarily gifted men are similarly affected to the utmost extent of their intellect and sensibility.  We grow tired of the works of man.  In the realms of art we ever crave something unseen before.  We demand new fashions, and when the old are once laid aside, we wonder that they should ever have excited even a moment’s admiration.  But Nature, though she is always the same, never satiates us.  The simple little Daisy which Burns has so sweetly commemorated is the same flower that was “of all flowres the flowre,” in the estimation of the Patriarch of English poets, and which so delighted Wordsworth in his childhood, in his middle life, and in his old age.  He gazed on it, at intervals, with unchanging affection for upwards of fourscore years.

The Daisy—­the miniature sun with its tiny rays—­is especially the favorite of our earliest years.  In our remembrances of the happy meadows in which we played in childhood, the daisy’s silver lustre is ever connected with the deeper radiance of its gay companion, the butter-cup, which when held against the dimple on the cheek or chin of beauty turns it into a little golden dell.  The thoughtful and sensitive frequenter of rural scenes discovers beauty every where; though it is not always the sort of beauty that would satisfy the taste of men who recognize no gaiety or loveliness beyond the walls of cities.  To the poet’s eye even the freckles on a milk-maid’s brow are not without a grace, associated as they are with health, and the open sunshine.

Chaucer tells us that the French call the Daisy La belle Marguerite.  There is a little anecdote connected with the appellation.  Marguerite of Scotland, the Queen of Louis the Eleventh, presented Marguerite Clotilde de Surville, a poetess, with a bouquet of daisies, with this inscription; “Marguerite d’Ecosse a Marguerite (the pearl) d’Helicon.”