9O Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



spirit of Phyllis is still alive in it, and, conscious of the 

 clasp, comes forth in the shape of a thousand flowers. Is 

 this to be relegated to the domain of the absurd ? Never 

 pronounce a thing to be meaningless because on the 

 instant you do not perceive the secret of its significance. 

 Phyllis has lived and died a thousand times, in every age 

 and country; the wanderer, on his return, has never 

 failed to find the poet's almond-tree, woman's faithful 

 love, awaiting him.* 



When the almond-tree was first brought to England is. 

 not known. Probably in the Plantagenet times; possibly 

 much earlier, since, in an Anglo-Saxon Catalogue of the 

 eleventh century, it has the name of "eastern nutte- 

 beam." Chaucer alludes to it in the Canterbury Tales 



. " And almandres gret plente ; " 



but this does not imply that he had seen the tree in 

 England, though very possibly he had met with it upon 

 the continent, since the poets are allowed to employ such 

 names not only as metaphors, but for the sake of pictu- 

 resque effect in their descriptions. In any case the tree 

 had become common in the gardens in and around 

 London by the time of Elizabeth. The interest of the 

 Chaucerian line consists in the light it throws upon the 

 history of the spelling of the name, which is no other 

 than a curious modification of the original Greek amyg- 



* In the " Epistles of the Heroines " Ovid has bequeathed us one 

 supposed to be written by Phyllis when in her deepest grief 

 without question the most tender and beautiful composition of its 

 kind extant in any language. 



