The Daisy--the miniature sun with its tiny rays--is especially the favorite of our earliest years. In our remembrances of the happy meadows in which we played in childhood, the daisy's silver lustre is ever connected with the deeper radiance of its gay companion, the butter-cup, which when held against the dimple on the cheek or chin of beauty turns it into a little golden dell. The thoughtful and sensitive frequenter of rural scenes discovers beauty every where; though it is not always the sort of beauty that would satisfy the taste of men who recognize no gaiety or loveliness beyond the walls of cities. To the poet's eye even the freckles on a milk-maid's brow are not without a grace, associated as they are with health, and the open sunshine.
Chaucer tells us that the French call the Daisy _La belle Marguerite_. There is a little anecdote connected with the appellation. Marguerite of Scotland, the Queen of Louis the Eleventh, presented Marguerite Clotilde de Surville, a poetess, with a bouquet of daisies, with this inscription; "Marguerite d'Ecosse à Marguerite (_the pearl_) d'Helicon."
The country maidens in England practise a kind of sortilége with this flower. They pluck off leaf by leaf, saying alternately "_He loves me_" and "_He loves me not_." The omen or oracle is decided by the fall of either sentence on the last leaf.
It is extremely difficult to rear the daisy in India. It is accustomed to all weathers in England, but the long continued sultriness of this clime makes it as delicate as a languid English lady in a tropical exile, and however carefully and skilfully nursed, it generally pines for its native air and dies.[088]
--Yon swelling downs where the sweet air stirs The harebells, and where prickly furze Buds lavish gold.
Fair maidens, I'll sing you a song, I'll tell of the bonny wild flower, Whose blossoms so yellow, and branches so long, O'er moor and o'er rough rocky mountains are flung Far away from trim garden and bower
The PRICKLY GORSE or Goss or Furze, (_ulex_)[089] I cannot omit to notice, because it was the plant which of all others most struck Dillenius when he first trod on English ground. He threw himself on his knees and thanked Heaven that he had lived to see the golden undulation of acres of wind-waved gorse. Linnaeus lamented that he could scarcely keep it alive in Sweden even in a greenhouse.