Note 72 — Chapter II · THE MAGIC OF WORDS

“There must have been a time when a simple instinct for poetry was possessed by all nations as it still is by uncivilised races and children. Among European nations this instinct appears to be dead for ever. We can name neither a mountain nor a flower.”—Prof. Weekley, Romance of Words. “Who did first name the flowers? Who first gave them, not their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, fanciful, poetic, rustic ones, that run so curiously alike in all the vulgar tongues? Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna’s tears? the wild blue hyacinth, St. Dorothy’s flower? the starry passiflora, the Passion of Christ; who named them all first, in the old days that are forgotten? All the poets that ever the world has known might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin.”—Anon.