No Flowers.
How bleak and drear the earth would seem
Were there no flower faces
To give the hills, the woods and fields
Their pleasing charms and graces!
Could spring be spring without a flower
To smile at April’s weeping?
Would robins trill so gay a song,
Or May day be worth keeping?
And only think how bare the hedge
Would look without its posies!—
How queer ’twould be to have a June
That did not smell like roses!
No dandelions on the sward
For childhood’s busy fingers;
No morning-glories, drinking dew,
While golden sunrise lingers!
No violets, with hoods of blue,
To nod at mild spring’s coming;
No clover blossoms—would we hear
The busy bees’ soft humming?
And were there no forget-me-nots,
No buttercups or daisies,
The children would be lost for sports,
The poet lost for phrases.
Ferns.
Ferns, beautiful ferns,
By the side of the running waters,
Lovely and sweet and fresh,
As the fairest of earth-born daughters;
Under the dreamy shade
Of the forest’s mighty branches,
Curving their graceful shapes
To the playful wind’s advances.
Ferns, delicate ferns,
Neighbors of emerald mosses,
Having no thought or care
For worldly attainments or losses.
Children of shadow serene,
Fresh at the heart through the summer,
Over the cool springs they lean,
Where the sunbeam is rarely a comer.
Ferns, feathery ferns,
Delicate, slender and frail,
Nursed by the streamlet, whose song
Is music for hillside and vale.
Purity, modesty, grace,
Emblems of these to the mind,
Loving the quietest place
That ever a sunbeam will find.
Sweet Peas.
Oh, what is the use of such pretty wings
If one never, never can fly?
Pink and fine as the clouds that shine
In the delicate morning sky.
With a perfume sweet as the lilies keep
Down in their vases so white and deep.
The brown bees go humming aloft;
The humming-bird soars away;
The butterfly blows like the leaf of a rose,
Off, off in the sunshine gay;
While you peep over the garden wall,
Looking so wistfully after them all.
Are you tired of the company
Of the balsams so dull and proud?
Of the coxcombs bold and the marigold,
And the spider-wort wrapped in a cloud?
Have you not plenty of sunshine and dew,
And crowds of gay gossips to visit you?
How you flutter, and reach, and climb!
How eager your wee faces are!
Aye, turned to the light till the blind old night
Is led to the world by a star.
Well, it surely is hard to feel one’s wings,
And still be prisoned like wingless things.
“Tweet, tweet,” then says Parson Thrush,
Who is preaching up in a tree;
“Though you never may fly while the world goes by,
Take heart, little flowers,” says he;
“For often, I know, to the souls that aspire
Comes something better than their desire!”
St. Nicholas.
The Trailing Arbutus.
I wandered lone where the pine trees made
Against the east their barricade;
And, guided by its sweet
Perfume, I found within a narrow dell
The trailing spring flower, tinted like a shell,
Amid dry leaves and mosses at my feet.
From under dead boughs, for whose loss the pines
Moaned ceaseless overhead, the blossoming vines
Lifted their glad surprise,
While yet the bluebird smoothed in leafless trees
His feathers, ruffled by chill sea breeze,
And snowdrifts lingered under April skies.
As, pausing, o’er the lowly flowers I bent,
I thought of lives thus lowly, clogged and pent,
Which yet find room,
Through care and cumber, coldness and decay,
To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day,
And make the sad earth happier for their bloom.
A Bunch of Cowslips.
In the rarest of English valleys
A motherless girl ran wild,
And the greenness and silence and gladness
Were soul of the soul of the child.
The birds were her gay little brothers,
The squirrels her sweethearts shy;
And her heart kept tune with the raindrops,
And sailed with the clouds in the sky;
And angels kept coming and going,
With beautiful things to do;
And wherever they left a footprint,
A cowslip or primrose grew.
She was taken to live in London—
So thick with pitiless folk—
And she could not smile for its badness,
And could not breathe for its smoke;
And now as she lay on her pallet,
Too weary and weak to rise,
A smile of ineffable longing
Brought dews to her faded eyes;
“Oh, me! for a yellow cowslip,
A pale little primrose dear!
Won’t some kind angel remember,
And pluck one and bring it here?”
They brought her a bunch of cowslips;
She took them with fingers weak,
And kissed them, and stroked them, and loved them,
And laid them against her cheek.
“It was kind of the angels to send them;
And now I’m too tired to pray,
If God looks down at the cowslips,
He’ll know what I want to say.”
They buried them in her bosom;
And when she shall wake and rise,
Why may not the flowers be quickened,
And bloom in her happy skies?
Daffodils.
We have short time to stay as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth, to meet decay,
As you or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer’s rain,
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew,
Ne’er to be found again.
Chrysanthemums.
Bravest of brave sweet blossoms in all of the garden-row;
Fair, when most of the flowers shrink from the winds that blow;
Gay, when the dismal north wind wails through the tree-tops dumb;
Breathing a breath of gladness is the brave Chrysanthemum.
One is of tawny color; another of cardinal glow,
As the cheek of a sun-warmed maiden and reddest of wine will show;
While some are of gorgeous yellow, like gold in a monarch’s crown,
And some of a royal purple, dusted with softest down.
Some of a creamy whiteness, touched to a rosy blush,
As the snow of the lovely Jungfrau glows with a sunset flush;
Some flame at the heart, pearl-petaled; and lavender-hued are some;
Yet each of them, crude or cultured, just a brave Chrysanthemum.
Roses.
It is summer, says a fairy,
Bring me tissue light and airy;
Bring me colors of the rarest,
Search the rainbow for the fairest
Sea-shell, pink and sunny yellow,
Kingly crimson, deep and mellow;
Faint red in Aurora beaming,
And the white in pure pearl gleaming.
The Message of the Snowdrop.
Courage and hope, true heart!
Summer is coming though late the spring,
Over the breast of the quiet mold,
With an emerald shimmer—a glint of gold,
Till the leaves of the regal rose unfold
At the rush of the swallow’s wing.
Courage and hope, true heart!
Summer is coming though spring be late;
Wishing is weary and waiting is long,
But sorrow’s day hath an even-song,
And the garlands that never shall fade belong
To the soul that is strong to wait.
Ragged Sailors.
O ragged, ragged Sailors!
I pray you answer me:
What may you all be doing
So far away from sea?
“We’re loitering by the roadsides,
We’re lingering on the hills,
To talk with pretty Daisies
In stiff and snowy frills.
“And though our blue be ragged,
Right welcome still are we
To tell the nodding lasses
Long tales about the sea!”