Mrs. Hemans--a little unnecessarily, perhaps--dwells upon the fact that
though the flowers sleep in dust through the wintry hours, they break
forth in glory in the spring. For Longfellow, as for Horace Smith, they
are 'emblems of our own great resurrection.' George Morine, in verses
little known, reminds us that while cities fall away, and arts flourish
and decay, these 'frailer things' will continue to adorn the world
'unchangingly the same.' Though covered for a time by 'the wee white
fairies of the snow,' they come back, says Gerald Massey, 'with their
fragrant news,' and tell in a thousand hues their dream of beauty. For
their annual disappearance from our midst, Thomas Westwood gives a
poetical explanation:

'Wearied out with shine and shade,
It rejoiced them, one and all,
To escape from daylight's ken
To their chambers subterrain,
There to rest awhile, and then
Weave them fresh, and weave them fair,
And their fragrant spells prepare.'

Alas! there are those who must needs draw a melancholy moral from the
most consolatory phenomena. And so Charlotte Smith, while admitting that

'Another May new buds and flowers shall bring,'

must needs exclaim,

'Ah! why has happiness no second Spring?'

And the dismal reflection finds an echo in the heart of D. M. Moir:

'Green Spring again shall bid
Your boughs with bloom be crown'd;
But alas! to Man,
In earth's brief span,
No second Spring comes round!'

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