HONE YS UCKLE 7 9 



bered, in Midsummer Night's Dream, uses both words, 

 where Titania exclaims — 



Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms, 

 So doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle. 

 Gently entwist. 



Milton errs in applying the name " twisted eglantine " 

 to the honeysuckle, since eglantime, as we have seen, is 

 an alternative name for the sweet-briar, but we find 

 Shakespeare clearly distinguishes between them in these 

 lines — 



O'ercanopied with luscious woodbine, 

 With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. 



Shenstone, too, discriminates — 



Come, gentle air ! and while the thickets bloom 

 Convey the jasmin's breath divine, 

 Convey the woodbine's rich perfume. 

 Nor spare the sweet-leaved eglantine — 



though his placing the jasmine, a purely garden flower, 

 in the thicket will scarcely bear over. In Anglo-Saxon 

 plant lists we find the honeysuckle appearing both as 

 wudu-wind and wudu-bind, the plant that both winds 

 and binds. 



Milton writes in one of his poems of " the well-attired 

 woodbine," but elsewhere he sits him down upon a 

 bank " with ivy canopied," and proceeds to refer to the 

 *' flaunting honeysuckle"; and Thomson in like fashion 

 tells of "a bower where woodbines flaunt." But this notion 

 of bold ostentation and self-assertion is very much beside 

 the mark, and all lovers of the plant — as, indeed, who are 

 not ? — will raise their protest. Cowper goes to the other 



