CHAPTER XI
CHILDREN'S FLOWERS, PLANTS, AND TREES.
As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he
flourishes.
—Psalm ciii. 15.
A child at play in meadows green,
Plucking the fragrant flowers,
Chasing the white-winged butterflies,—
So sweet are childhood's hours.
We meet wi' blythesome and kythesome cheerie weans,
Daffin' and laughin' far adoon the leafy lanes,
Wi' gowans and buttercups buskin' the thorny wands—
Sweetly singin' wi' the flower-branch wavin' in their hands.
Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first
feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise,
if some day when I am alone in a wood, one of the trees were to
speak to me.—Sir John Lubbock.
O who can tell
The hidden power of herbs, and might of magic spell?—Spenser.
Plant Life and Human Life.
Flowers, plants, and trees have ever been interwoven with the fate of man in the minds of poets and folk-thinkers. The great Hebrew psalmist declared: "As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth," and the old Greeks said beautifully, [greek: oiæper phyllôn geneæ, toiæde kai andrôn], "as is the generation of leaves, so is also that of men"; or, to quote the words of Homer (Iliad, vi. 146):—
"Like as the generation of leaves, so also is that of men;
For the wind strews the leaves on the ground; but the forest,
Putting forth fresh buds, grows on, and spring will presently return.
Thus with the generation of men; the one blooms, the other fades away."