THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PLANT. 



The closeness of the attachment and the apparent indissolubility of the union 

 give peculiar point to this elegant sarcasm. 



The suggestion of an affectionate alliance,,, as if Vivian and Merlin were 

 counterparts of the ivy and the elm, occurred to Horace in the very same form as 

 to the latest of our own poets. His thirty-sixth ode concludes as follows : 



" Here let the Rose and Lily shed 

 Their short-liv'd bloom j let parsley spread 

 Its living verdure o'er the feast, 

 And crown with mingled sweets the guest. 

 In Damalis each amorous boy 

 Shall gaze with eyes that flow with joy, 

 While she, as curls the Ivy-plant, 

 Shall twine luxuriant round her new gallant." * 



To conclude this chapter let us turn to Euripides, and observe how the most 

 tender and pathetic of the Greek bards'discovers in the intimate union of the ivy 

 and its supporting tree, an analogy with the endurance and constancy of the love 

 that makes perpetual youth in every human heart, that will be but true to its own 

 impulses. The passage occurs in " Hecuba," and is, without question, one of the 

 finest of its class in all the vast range of ancient and modern dramatic literature- 

 Hecuba, already weighed down by an accumulation of miseries, is now distressed 

 beyond relief of tears by the demand of Ulysses for her daughter, who is doomed 

 to be offered a sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles ; and at this demand she lets go 

 her last hold on life, and would fain add to the smoke of the funeral oblation : 



" Ulysses. The virgin's death sufficeth, and 



We add not more. Would heaven hers might be spared ! 



With honeysuckle, and both these entwine 

 Themselves with bryony and jessamine." 



" In many of our counties," says Gifford, " the woodbine is still the name for the great 

 convolvulus." 



This sort of criticism is akin to that to which the Mosaic cosmogony has been subjected, and 

 which Mr. Goodwin shattered at a blow, by declaring that what Moses wrote Moses meant, and 

 there was an end of the matter. In like manner it may be said that when Shakspere speaks 

 of the ivy, he means the ivy, and not the honeysuckle, or convolvulus, or anything but ivy. The 

 object of commentators appears to be not seldom to make confusion worse confounded. 



1 Francis's translation. The soul of the original is in the line 

 " Lascivis hederis ambitiosior." 



