Garden Fancies

(Published in Hoods Magazine , July 1844.) I. The Flower’s Name. The poem describes a garden wherein to a lover’s fancy every shrub and flower is hallowed by the looks and touch of the woman he loves. One flower in particular she named by its “soft meandering Spanish name.” He bids the buds she touched to stay as they are, never to open, but to be loved for ever. Even the roses are not so fair after all, compared with the “shut pink mouth” her fingers have touched. In II., Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis , we have a garden without romance. A student takes amongst the flowers a pedantic old volume, a treatise as dry and crabbed as its title. He read it; then, for his revenge, threw the book into the crevice of a plum tree, amongst the fungi, the mo , and creeping things. Solacing himself with bread and cheese and wine, he read the jolly Rabelais to rid his brain of cobwebs. In proce of time the student came to think he had been too severe with the old author, so be fished him up with a rake and put him in an appropriate place on the library shelves, there to dry-rot at ease.