Page:The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated.djvu/233

135 lady over several acres, had a similar taste for collossal portraiture; but his flowers are disposed with infinite grace and poetic beauty. He very sweetly alludes to the Marigold closing at night, and partially hiding its golden petals within the green calyx, by saying that the ladie wound up her yellow locks, and hid them in a green caul or cap.

The "garden-queen," the, outvies even the dainty Violet in the number and enthusiasm of her laureates; she is indeed unrivalled, both in popular and poetical fame; nor has she yet lost much of her renown, for a rarity in literature would be that poem, if of any length, which should fail to offer its homage at her fair and fragrant shrine. This favourite of gods and men, the emblem of love and beauty, and the mute but expressive monitress that "all that's bright must fade," has been in all ages the unwearying theme of the Poets, from the gay odes of Anacreon to the quaint moralizing songs and sonnets of our old English writers; and from them, through a long and glorious vista of names, illustrious among the mind's nobility, down to the present time, with its few great and countless lesser lights.

Spenser's sweetest allusion to the Rose is in this "lovely lay" from his Faërie Queen; it is very beautiful.

The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:—

"Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,

In springing flowre the image of thy day!

Ah! see the virgin Rose, how sweetly shee

Doth first peep foorth with bashfull modestee,

That fairer seems the lesse ye see her may.