And, little Butterfly! indeed

I know not if you sleep or feed.

How motionless

not frozen seas

More motionless! and then

What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!

This plot of orchard-ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister's flowers,
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!1

Come often to us, fear no wrong;

Sit near us on the bough!

We'll talk of sunshine and of song,

And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty days are now.

Many of the flowers in the orchard at Dove Cottage were planted by Dorothy Wordsworth. The "summer days" of childhood are referred to in the previous poem To a Butterfly, written on the 14th of March 1802. See also note to previous poem, The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly (p. 264).-ED.

[Also composed in the Orchard, Town-end, Grasmere.]

THAT is work of waste and ruin-2

Do as Charles and I are doing!

Strawberry-blossoms, one and all
We must spare them-here are many:
Look at it the flower is small,
Small and low, though fair as any:
Do not touch it! summers two

I am older, Anne, than you.

Pull the primrose, sister Anne!

Pull as many as you can.

-Here are daisies, take your fill;

Pansies, and the cuckoo-flower:
Of the lofty daffodil

Make your bed, or make your bower;
Fill your lap, and fill your bosom ;
Only spare the strawberry-blossom!

Primroses, the Spring may love them—
Summer knows but little of them:

Violets, a barren kind,2

Withered on the ground must lie;

Daisies leave no fruit behind
When the pretty flowerets die;
Pluck them, and another year
As many will be blowing here.3

God has given a kindlier power
To the favoured strawberry-flower.

and make

1807.

1807.

1807.

Hither soon as spring is fled

You and Charles and I will walk; 1
Lurking berries, ripe and red,

Then will hang on every stalk,

Each within its leafy bower;

And for that promise spare the flower!?

"Wednesday, 28th April (1802).-Copied the Prioress's Tale. Wm. was in the orchard. He worked away at his poem, though he was ill, and tired. I happened to say that when I was a child I would not have pulled a strawberry blossom; I left him, and wrote out the Manciple's Tale. At dinner time he came in with the poem of 'Children gathering flowers,' but it was not quite finished, and it kept him long from his dinner. It is now done. He is working at the Tinker." (Dorothy Wordsworth's Diary). At an earlier date in the same year,-Jan. 31st, 1802,-the following occurs in the same Diary: "I found a strawberry blossom in a rock. The little slender flower had more courage than the green leaves, for they were but half expanded and half grown, but the blossoms was spread full out. I uprooted it rashly, and I felt as if I had been committing an outrage; so I planted it again. It will have but a stormy life of it, but let it live if it can."ED.

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere. It is remarkable that this flower, coming out so early in the spring as it does, and so bright and beautiful, and in such profusion, should not have been noticed earlier in English What adds much to the interest that attends it is its habit of shutting itself up and opening out according to the degree of light and temperature of the air.]

verse.