‘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 associations they called up. ‘I dote upon you,’ he wrote, in an address to them, ‘for ye waft me to summers of old;’