The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.’[[64]]
Artificial flowers look pretty in a lady’s head-dress; but they will not do to stick into lofty verse. On the contrary, a crocus bursting out of the ground seems to blush with its own golden light—‘a thing of life.’ So a greater authority than Lord Byron has given his testimony on this subject: ‘Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Shakspeare speaks of—
——‘Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares and take
The winds of March with beauty.’
All this play of fancy and dramatic interest could not be transferred to a description of hot-house plants, regulated by a thermometer. Lord Byron unfairly enlists into the service of his argument those artificial objects, which are direct imitations of nature, such as statuary, etc. This is an oversight. At this rate, all poetry would be artificial poetry. Dr. Darwin is among those, who have endeavoured to confound the distinctions of natural and artificial poetry, and indeed, he is, perhaps, the only one who has gone the whole length of Lord Byron’s hypercritical and super-artificial theory. Here are some of his lines, which have been greatly admired.
Apostrophe to Steel.
‘Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord,
King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!