"Our good Queen is ever striving to keep the dear flowers from the power of the cruel Frost-King; many ways she tried, but all have failed.
Evening came, and with it troops of Elves to counsel their good Queen, who, seated on her mossy throne, looked anxiously upon the throng below, whose glittering wings and rustling robes gleamed like many-colored flowers.
[He opens his umbrella and dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a
flower girl, who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of her hands.
Then it dawned on the Prince that he had been speaking to a good fairy, and putting the little bell carefully in his pocket, he rode home and told his father that he meant to set the daughter of the
Flower Queen free, and intended setting out on the following day into the wide world in search of the maid.
They walked along listening to the singing of the brightly colored birds and looking at the lovely
flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them.
He belonged to that natural, humorous school who took for their motto in the seventeenth century the aphorism uttered by one of their number in 1653, -- "To despise
flowers is to offend God."
And because the breath of
flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to know what be the
flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
All hurriedly she knelt upon a bed Of
flowers : of lilies such as rear'd the head
They now thought of placing the boxes across the gutter, so that they nearly reached from one window to the other, and looked just like two walls of
flowers. The tendrils of the peas hung down over the boxes; and the rose-trees shot up long branches, twined round the windows, and then bent towards each other: it was almost like a triumphant arch of foliage and
flowers.
I could give many facts, showing how anxious bees are to save time; for instance, their habit of cutting holes and sucking the nectar at the bases of certain
flowers, which they can, with a very little more trouble, enter by the mouth.
Botany was, I knew, a favourite study of his: and these
flowers were to me so entirely new and mysterious, that I was really curious to see what a botanist would say of them.
In the morning when he awoke, he began to search over hill and dale for this pretty
flower; and eight long days he sought for it in vain: but on the ninth day, early in the morning, he found the beautiful purple
flower; and in the middle of it was a large dewdrop, as big as a costly pearl.