26 MISSOUKI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



and accurate, and Tennyson who has hung on many a plant 

 "jewels five-words -long " of exquisite epithet. And to 

 name apart him who soars in supreme dominion over all 

 English verse, William Shakespeare, we find that he holds 

 the mirror up to vegetable as well as human nature, and 

 with the same felicity. Not even the difference between 

 the upper and under surface of a leaf escapes him. Ophelia 

 is drowned where 



A willow grows aslant the brook 

 That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. 



And the play composed in the serene maturity of his 

 genius, The Winter's Tale, contains the most marvelous bit 

 of poetic botany overwritten, a description of some familiar 

 Warwickshire flowers as intense and lucid as are his portraits 

 of Rosalind and Imogen. Perdita gives the very essence 

 of the plant in its relations to human hearts when she 

 speaks of 



daffodills 



That come before the swallow dares, and take 



The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, 



But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 



Or Cytherea's breath. 



It is no sentimentality of some age or school, this flower- 

 song of the English poets. Our literature is like a medi- 

 eval manuscript where spray and blossom twine into and 

 help make up the text. The lightest fancy may perch upon 

 some gay corolla, or the meanest flower that blows may 

 give thoughts that lie too deep for tears. 



Crossing the Atlantic makes no change. The verse of 

 Bryant and Lowell, the prose of Thoreau and Burroughs 

 and Gibson are enough to prove that the love of the lilies 

 is in American as well as English literature. 



Let me remind you of another characteristic of this lit- 

 erature, written on both sides the sea; it is, take it for all 

 in all, the most Christian ever known. Not that it is most 

 prolific in manuals of devotion, not that it leads in exeget- 

 ics or dogmatics, — it has no Summa Theologica, no Imitatio 



