PINK 



So bashful when I spied her So breathless till I passed her, 



So pretty, so ashamed ! So helpless when I turned 



So hidden in her leaflets And bore her struggling, blushing, 



>>est anybody find : Her simple haunts beyond 1 



For whom I robbed the dingle, 

 For whom betrayed the dell, 

 Many will doubtless ask me, 

 But I shall never tell ! " 



Yet we are all free to guess and what flower at least in the 

 early year, before it has gained that touch of confidence which 

 it acquires later is so bashful, so pretty, so flushed with rosy 

 shame, so eager to defend its modesty by closing its blushing 

 petals when carried off by the despoiler as the spring beauty ? 

 To be sure, she is not " hidden in her leaflets," although often 

 seeking concealment beneath the leaves of other plants but 

 why not assume that Miss Dickinson has availed herself of some- 

 thing of the license so freely granted to poets especially, it 

 seems to me to poets of nature ? Perhaps of this class few are 

 more accurate than she, and although we wonder at the sudden 

 blindness which leads her to claim that 



44 Nature rarer uses yellow 

 Than another hue " 



when it seems as though it needed but little knowledge of flow- 

 ers to recognize that yellow, probably, occurs more frequently 

 among them than any other color, and also at the representation 

 of this same nature as 



" Spending scarlet like a woman " 



when in reality she is so chary of this splendid hue, still we can- 

 not but appreciate that this poet was in close and peculiar sym- 

 pathy with flowers, and was wont to paint them with more than 

 customary fidelity. 



We look for the spring beauty in April and May, and often 

 find it in the same moist places on a brook's edge or skirting 

 the wet woods as the yellow adder's tongue. It is sometimes 



199 



