until we have too much of it, and become monkish, savage and misanthropic.  The asceticism of manhood is apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his guard against his neighbor.  In a crowded car, men instinctively clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking old gentleman opposite.  When we see men so distrustful, we shun them.  They then call us selfish when we feel only solitary.  We protest against such manhood as would lower golden ideals of youth to its own contemptible Avernus.  And now as our daisy, which is blooming before us, sagely nods its white crest as it is swayed by the passing breeze, it seems to bring back of itself decades gone forever.  We never intend to become a man.  We keep our boy’s heart ever fresh and ever warm.  We don’t care if the whole human race, from the Ascidians to Darwin himself, assail us and fiercely thrust us once more into short jackets and knickerbockers, provided they allow an indefinite vacation in a daisy field.  The joy of childhood is said to be vague.  It was all satisfying to us once, and we do not intend to allow it to waste in unconscious effervescence among the gaudier though less gratifying delights of manhood.

It is, however, of daisies among the poets we would speak at more length.  In fact, to the imaginative mind, the daisy in poetry is as suggestive as the daisy in nature.  Philosophically, they are identical; in the absence of the one you can commune with the other.  Thus unconsciously the daisy undergoes a metempsychosis; its soul is transferred at will from meadow to book and from book to meadow, without losing a particle of its vitality.

To premise with the daisy historically:  Among the Romans it was called Bellis, or “pretty one;” in modern Greece, it is star-flower.  In France, Spain, and Italy, it was named “Marguerita,” or pearl, a term which, being of Greek origin, doubtless was brought from Constantinople by the Franks.  From the word “Marguerita,” poems in praise of the daisy were termed “Bargerets.”  Warton calls them “Bergerets,” or “songs du Berger,” that is, shepherd songs.  These were pastorals, lauding fair mistresses and maidens of the day under the familiar title of the daisy.  Froissart has written a characteristic Bargeret; and Chaucer, in his “Flower and the Leaf,” sings: 

  “And, at the last, there began, anone,
  A lady for to sing right womanly,
  A bargaret in praising the daisie;
  For as methought among her notes sweet,
  She said, ’Si douce est la Margarite.”

Speght supposes that Chaucer here intends to pay a compliment to Lady Margaret, King Edward’s daughter, Countess of Pembroke, one of his patronesses.  But Warton hesitates to express a decided opinion as to the reference.  Chaucer shows his love for the daisy in other places.  In his “Prologue to the Legend of Good Women,” alluding to the power with which the flowers drive him from his books, he says that