Let us not omit a reference to quaint but genial William Browne:—
"The Daisie, scattered on each meade and down,
A golden tuft within a silver crowne:
Fair fall that dainty flower! and may there be
No shepherd graced that does not honour thee!"
Yes! let no poet be taken to your heart of hearts who has no love for the "flower white and rede,"—in French, called "La Belle Marguerite,"—
"The op'ning gowan, wet wi' dew,"
—Burns's "bonnie gem,"—the flower of the meadow and the lea, of the woodland and the vale.
A modest, unassuming flower, destined to be trodden under the feet of the thoughtless, it withstands the rigorous breath of winter, is beautiful throughout the circle of the year—Bellis perennis, as the Swedish botanist not infelicitously called it. Its vegetation is arrested only during the harshest frosts; but it resumes its living growth as soon as it becomes sensible of the first rays of the spring-time sun.
It is at the moment of nature's awakening, about "the solemn Easter-tide," that this "sweet nursling of the vernal year" displays all the simple coquettishness of its chaplet of flowers,—that chaplet which has also procured for it the name of the tiny "Marguerite,"—that is, "little pearl,"—a name which the French have adopted from the Latin—Margarita.