The country maidens in England practise a kind of sortilege with this flower.  They pluck off leaf by leaf, saying alternately “He loves me” and “He loves me not.”  The omen or oracle is decided by the fall of either sentence on the last leaf.

It is extremely difficult to rear the daisy in India.  It is accustomed to all weathers in England, but the long continued sultriness of this clime makes it as delicate as a languid English lady in a tropical exile, and however carefully and skilfully nursed, it generally pines for its native air and dies.[088]

THE PRICKLY GORSE.

    —­Yon swelling downs where the sweet air stirs
    The harebells, and where prickly furze
    Buds lavish gold.

Keat’s Endymion.

    Fair maidens, I’ll sing you a song,
    I’ll tell of the bonny wild flower,
    Whose blossoms so yellow, and branches so long,
    O’er moor and o’er rough rocky mountains are flung
    Far away from trim garden and bower

L.A.  Tuamley.

The PRICKLY GORSE or Goss or Furze, (ulex)[089] I cannot omit to notice, because it was the plant which of all others most struck Dillenius when he first trod on English ground.  He threw himself on his knees and thanked Heaven that he had lived to see the golden undulation of acres of wind-waved gorse.  Linnaeus lamented that he could scarcely keep it alive in Sweden even in a greenhouse.

I have the most delightful associations connected with this plant, and never think of it without a summer feeling and a crowd of delightful images and remembrances of rural quietude and blue skies and balmy breezes.  Cowper hardly does it justice: 

    The common, over-grown with fern, and rough
    With prickly gorse, that shapeless and deformed
    And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom
    And decks itself with ornaments of gold,
    Yields no unpleasing ramble.

The plant is indeed irregularly shaped, but it is not deformed, and if it is dangerous to the touch, so also is the rose, unless it be of that species which Milton places in Paradise—­“and without thorns the rose.”

Hurdis is more complimentary and more just to the richest ornament of the swelling hill and the level moor.

    And what more noble than the vernal furze
    With golden caskets hung?

I have seen whole cotees or coteaux (sides of hills) in the sweet little island of Jersey thickly mantled with the golden radiance of this beautiful wildflower.  The whole Vallee des Vaux (the valley of vallies) is sometimes alive with its lustre.

VALLEE DES VAUX.

AIR—­THE MEETING OF THE WATERS.

    If I dream of the past, at fair Fancy’s command,
    Up-floats from the blue sea thy small sunny land! 
    O’er thy green hills, sweet Jersey, the fresh breezes blow,
    And silent and warm is the Vallee des Vaux!