The Butterfly

The butterfly wanted a sweetheart, and naturally it had to be a flower. He inspected them. Everyone sat as properly and quietly on her stalk as a young maiden should. The trouble was that there were too many of them to choose from, and the butterfly didn't want to be bothered by anything so fatiguing. He flew over the the chamomile flower. She is called by some the French Daisy and she knows how to tell the future. Young maidens and boys who are in love ask her questions, and then answer them by tearing off her petals, one at a time. This is the rhyme they usually recite:

"With all her [or his] heart...

With only a part...

Not lost forever...

She'll love me never."

Or something like that. You can ask the chamomile flower any questions you want to. When the butterfly came, he did not tear off any of the petals; he kissed them instead, for he was of the opinion that you get furthest with compliments.
"Sweet daisy, dear chamomile flower, matron of all the flowers, you who are so clever that you can see the future, answer me: which of the flowers will be my sweetheart? This one or that one? Please tell me so that I can fly directly over to her and propose at once."
The chamomile flower did not answer. The butterfly had insulted her by calling her a matron. She was a virgin and hadn't been proposed to yet. The butterfly asked the same question a second time and a third, then he got bored and flew away to go courting on his own.
It was early spring. Snowdrops and crocuses were still in bloom. "How sweet they are," he remarked. "Just confirmed, but they have no personalities." Like so many young men, he preferred older girls. He flew to the anemones but he found them too caustic. The violets were a little too romantic and the tulips a little too gaudy.
Soon the Easter lilies came, but they were a little too bourgeois. The linden blossoms were too small and had too large a family. The apple blossoms were so beautiful that they could be mistaken for roses, but they were here today and gone tomorrow. "Our marriage would be too short," the butterfly muttered.
He was most attracted by one of the sweet peas. She was red and white, pure and delicate; and was one of those rare beauties who also knows what a kitchen looks like. He was just about to propose when he happened to notice a pea pod with the withered flower at its tip. "Who is that?" he asked with alarm.
"That is my sister," replied the sweet pea.
"So that is what she will look like later," though the butterfly. "How frightening!" And he flew away.
The honey suckle had climbed over the fence. What a lot of girls there were, and all of them with long faces and yellow skins. The butterfly didn't care for them. But whom did he like? To find out, you must ask him.
Spring passed, summer passed, and then autumn came. Still the butterfly had no wife. The flowers were dressed in their finery, but they had lost their fresh innocence and scent of youth. As the heart grows older it needs scent, odor, perfume to arouse it and the dahlias and the hollyhocks have none.
The butterfly lighted on a little mint plant with curly leaves. "She has no flowers, but she is a flower from her roots to the tip of her tiny leaves. She smells like a flower. I shall marry her." And the butterfly proposed.
The mint plant stood stiff and silent. At last she replied: "Friendship, but no more! I am old and you are old. We can live for each other, but marriage, no! It would be ridiculous at our age."
And that is how it happened that the butterfly never got married.
He had searched too long for a wife, and now he had to remain a bachelor.
It was late in the autumn. The rains had come and the wind blew down the backs of the willow trees. It was not the weather to be out flying in, especially in summer clothes. But the butterfly was not outside, he was in a room that was kept summer-warm by a stove, where he could keep himself alive.
"But to live is not enough," declared the butterfly. "One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower." He flew to the windowpane. There he was seen admired, and a pin was stuck through him. He was "collected" and that is as much as a human being can do for a butterfly.
"Now I sit on a stalk just like the flowers," he said. "It isn't very comfortable, probably just like being married: you are stuck." And with that he consoled himself.
"Not much of a consolation," said the potted plants who lined the window sill.
"But you cannot trust potted plants," thought the butterfly, "they have associated too much with human beings."

-Hans Christian Andersen