NATURE AND THE POETS 



Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose, a 

 rank, tall weed that blooms with the mullein in late 

 summer. Its small, yellow, slightly fragrant blos- 

 soms open only at night, but remain open during 

 the next day. By cowslip, our poets and writers 

 generally mean the yellow marsh marigold, which 

 belongs to a different family of plants, but which, 

 as a spring token and a pretty flower, is a very good 

 substitute for the cowslip. Our real cowslip, the 

 shooting star, is very rare, and is one ofithe most 

 beautiful of native flowers. I believe it is not found 

 north of Pennsylvania. I have found it in a single 

 locality in the District of Columbia, and the day 

 is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster of 

 pink flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving 

 the air. I do not know that it has ever been men- 

 tioned in poetry. 



Another flower, which I suspect our poets see 

 largely through the medium of English litera- 

 ture and invest with borrowed charms, is the vio- 

 let. The violet is a much more winsome and 

 poetic flower in England than it is in this coun- 

 try, for the reason that it comes very early and is 

 sweet-scented ; our common violet is not among 

 the earliest flowers, and it is odorless. It af- 

 fects 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: 



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