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 ray 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 



