The letters out to her mistress, and she, Mrs. E. Hubbard,
looking over the pile remarked that she saw the Selborne
Magazine had come and she would just glance over it to see if it
contained anything to interest both of us.
After a minute or two she exclaimed "Why, here is a poem by Charlie
Longman! How strange - I never suspected him of being a poet!"
She was speaking of C. J. Longman, the publisher, and it must be
explained that he was an intimate friend and connection of hers through
his marriage with her niece, the daughter of Sir John Evans the
antiquary, and sister of Sir Arthur Evans.
The poem was To the Orange-tip Butterfly.
Cardamines! Cardamines!
Thine hour is when the thrushes sing,
When gently stirs the vernal breeze,
When earth and sky proclaim the spring;
When all the fields melodious ring
With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees
Put on their green, then art thou king
Of butterflies, Cardamines.
What though thine hour be brief, for thee
The storms of winter never blow,
No autumn gales shall scorn the lea,
Thou scarce shalt feel the summer's glow;
But soaring high or flitting low,
Or racing with the awakening bees
For spring's first draughts of honey - so
Thy life is passed, Cardamines.
Cardamines! Cardamines!
E'en among mortal men I wot
Brief life while spring-time quickly flees
Might seem a not ungrateful lot:
For summer's rays are scorching hot
And autumn holds but summer's lees,
And swift in autumn is forgot
The winter comes, Cardamines.
So well pleased were we with this little lyric that we read it aloud
two or three times over to each other: for it was a hot summer's day
when the early, freshness and bloom is over and the foliage takes on a
deeper, almost sombre green; and it brought back to us the vivid spring
feeling, the delight we had so often experienced on seeing again the
orange-tip, that frail delicate flutterer, the loveliest, the most
spiritual, of our butterflies.
Oddly enough, the very thing which, one supposes, would spoil a lyric
about any natural object - the use of a scientific instead of a popular
name, with the doubling and frequent repetition of it - appeared in this
instance to add a novel distinction and beauty to the verses.
The end of our talk on the subject was a suggestion I made that it
would be a nice act on her part to follow Longman's lead and write a
little nature poem for the next number of the magazine. This she said
she would do if I on my part would promise to follow her poem with one
by me, and I said I would.
Accordingly her poem, which I transcribe, made its appearance in the
next number.
