But Bess shook her head. “I will be a happy little girl,” she said, “but I’d rather not go all the same,” and she left me.
So I started off alone with Mouse, who, nothing loth, followed me gladly on my expedition.
We all have favourite flowers, or imagine that we have, probably owing to some early association or to some tender recollection. Queen Bess is said to have best loved meadow-sweet, with which her chambers were strewn. The great Condé, they say, was devoted to pinks; and Marie Antoinette is said to have loved sweet rocket, bunches of which were brought her by Madame Richard to the Temple.
I called to mind these favourite blossoms, but my floral love is not of the garden, it has no place in tended borders. I love it even better than the choicest rose, or the most brilliant gladiolus, or the most stately lily. It grows amongst the hedgerows of Shropshire, and is known as the wild white violet.
THE FLOWERS OF SPRING
Its scent is sweet but often elusive, and as evanescent as a beautiful smile. Our highly cultivated borders and parterres are beautiful, but our wild carpets in field and wood more beautiful. Wild flowers come amidst the grass, and blossom at their own sweet will in their own sweet place, and the moor, meadow, or coppice make the most enchanting background for their loveliness.
I wandered along the green paths with hedgerows starting into life, and came to the conclusion that the flowers we each love best are the homely flowers of childhood that we played by, and plucked as children. The dog-rose, the violet, or the primrose, whose leaves we know the inside and the outside of, whose stalks we have handled a hundred times, and whose scents recall dear faces, and gentle memories, that go back to long ago.
I walked along, Mouse following dutifully behind me. The hedgerows were full of green curls and twists, groups of wild arums glittered on the banks below hazel and quickset hedges. Here and there little patches of grass had burst into emerald green, and a few daisies were turning their discs to heaven, whilst in sheltered spots dim primroses were dawning shyly on the world, filling the atmosphere with sweet dalliance and dreaminess. Once, as I wandered along, I saw behind a cottage in a lane a mauve carpet of periwinkles, and once, beneath a chestnut, I saw the glitter of golden king-cups, that Wordsworth loved so well. The afternoon was very fair, purple and golden lights flitted round the hills and rested on the freshly ploughed hillsides; “longer days and sunshine,” the thrushes seemed to sing, and I heard them piping exultantly in every orchard as I passed. I went by the Red Marsh Farm, past the old mullion-windowed barn, which is said to have been a chapel in monkish days, and so across the close-nipped fields to Sherlot Forest. I walked by a patch of gorse all ablaze with golden blossoms. Tiny young rabbits dashed under cover, showing their white scuts. My great hound lumbered after them like a luggage train in mad career; but nothing happened—they vanished like lightning, and Mouse joined me panting at the hunting gate below. As I whistled her into heel, I noticed that the honeysuckles in the hedgerow were clothing themselves in silvery green, and that a willow by a pool was bursting into golden glory. The earth was dry and I could not resist sitting down for a moment. A squirrel dashed up an oak and scolded and chattered, Mouse, seeing him, growled angrily; a greenfinch flew from out of a thicket, giving me a beautiful vision of apple-green wings; whilst in the distance I heard, far off, the note of a distant blackbird singing a song of regret and tender longing. How enchantingly lovely all was, and on all sides no sounds but country ones.
I peeped over the hedge, men were ploughing and sowing the grain, and away to the west I heard a boy whistling a few notes of a half-forgotten tune. What was the tune, I wondered.
How few folks whistle or sing now; the time was when everybody “sang a bit,” as Burbidge calls it, to their work—men in the hayfields, women at the washtub. Was the world, when it sang at its work, a happier or jollier world? I asked myself.