The truth is, the imagination derives from Nature precisely what the former's capacity and quality admit of. As the Laureate said, years ago, any man may find in bud, or blade, or bloom, a meaning suited to his mind. Spenser, pondering on the rose and its thorns, and other such floral combinations, was led to remark that
'Every sweet with sour is tempered still.'
Equally impressed was he by the bounteous ease with which Nature scatters flowers all over the world. In Barry Cornwall's view, this facile profusion is Earth's expression of gratitude for the effulgence of the Sun:
'When on earth he smileth, she bursts forth In beauty like a bride, and gives him back, In sweet repayment for his warm bright love, A world of flowers.'
Beddoes had a quaint and curious fancy that 'when the dead awake or talk in sleep' the flowers 'hear their thoughts, and write them on their leaves, for heaven to look on.' Campbell seems to have loved flowers most for the associations they called up. 'I dote upon you,' he wrote, in an address to them, 'for ye waft me to summers of old;'
'I love you for lulling me back into dreams Of the blue Highland mountains and echoing streams.'
And we find another Scotchman, William Anderson, giving utterance to a similar expression of feeling.
There is a lesson which the flowers have taught to at least two of our poets, which, though it may have sympathizers, will scarcely find many practical adherents. It is embodied in a little lyric by Mrs. Webster, in which that lady, celebrating the beauty of a solitary blossom, describes how it is seen and gathered, and adds, ironically:
'Why should a flower be fair for its own? Choose it, pluck it to die.'
But the moral has been pointed even more effectively by the Rev. Gerard Lewis in some excellent verses. 'A gathered flower,' he says, 'is but a fading thing':
'Let woman's beauty wear the sterling gold, The imperishable gem. They give to her a brightness manifold, She adds a charm to them.
'But flowers that strew the earth with fragrant grace, As stars the welkin fill, Look loveliest, live the longest, in their place; To pluck them is to kill.'
That is true, and yet the gathering of flowers will go on. And, after all, what more can a blossom desire than to 'exist beautifully' and exhale its sweetness, whether it lies hidden by the wayside hedge, or decks the bosom of a woman as sweet and beautiful as itself?