poor Ophelia prattling to Laertes about the wreath she had woven; instead of her “rosemary,” and “pansies," and “herb-o'grace,” hear her discourse about “Plantanthera Blepharoglottis, or Psycodes, Ageratum, Syntheris, Houghtoniana, Banksia, and Jeffersonia,” &c., &c. Could her brother in that case have pos- sibly called her “O, rose of May, dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia?” No, indeed! And we may rest assured, that if the daisy, the douce Marguerite, had borne any one of these names, Chaucer would have snapped his fingers at it. We may feel confident that Shakspeare would then have showed it no mercy; all his fairies would have hooted at it; he would have tossed it to Sycorax and Caliban; he would not have let either Perdita or Ophelia touch it, nor Miranda, with her très doux regarder, look at it once.
Neither daisy, nor cowslip, nor snow-drop is found among the fields of the New World, but blossoms just as sweet and pretty are not wanting here, and it is really a crying shame to misname them. Unhappily, a large number of our plants are new discoveries—new, at least, when compared with Chaucer's daisy, Spenser's coronation flower, or Shakspeare's “pansies and herb-o'grace”—and having been first gathered since the days of Linnaeus, as specimens, their names tell far more of the musty hortus siccus, than of the gay and fragrant May-pole. But if we wish those who come after us to take a natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers, we should have names for the blossoms that mothers and nurses can teach children before they are “in Botany;” if we wish that American poets should sing our native flowers as sweetly and as simply as the daisy, and violets, and celandine have been sung from the time of Chaucer or Herrick, to that of
