NATURE AND THE POETS 85 



Another flower, which I suspect our poets see 

 largely through the medium of English literature 

 and invest with borrowed charms, is the violet. 

 The violet is a much more winsome and poetic 

 flower in England than it is in this country, for 

 the reason that it comes very early and is sweet- 

 scented; our common violet is not among the ear- 

 liest flowers, and it is odorless. It affects sunny 

 slopes, like the English flower; yet Shakespeare 

 never could have made the allusion to it which he 

 makes to his own species in these lines : 



" That strain again! it had a dying fall: 

 Oh! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south 

 That breathes upon a bank of violets, 

 Stealing and giving odor," 



or lauded it as 



" Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 

 Or Cytherea's breath." 



Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small, 

 white, lilac-veined species (not yellow, as Bryant 

 has it in his poem), that is common in wet, out-of- 

 the-way places. Our common blue violet the 

 only species that is found abundantly everywhere 

 in the North blooms in May, and makes bright 

 many a grassy meadow slope and sunny nook. 

 Yet, for all that, it does not awaken the emotion in 

 one that the earlier and more delicate spring flowers 

 do, the hepatica, say, with its shy wood habits, its 

 pure, infantile expression, and at times its delicate 

 perfume; or the houstonia, "innocence," fleck- 

 ing or streaking the cold spring earth with a milky 



