170 PROSERPINA. 



really is, unless he watch the flower in its early growth. It 

 becomes dim in age, and dark when it is gathered at least, 

 when it is tied in bunches ; but I am under the impression 

 that the colour actually deadens also, at all events, no other 

 single flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground 

 near it as a violet will. The bright hounds- tongue looks 

 merely like a spot of bright paint ; but a young violet glows 

 like painted glass. 



12. Which, when you have once well noticed, the two lines 

 of Milton and Shakspeare which seem opposed, will both be- 

 come clear to you. The said lines are dragged from hand to 

 hand along their pages of pilfered quotations by the hack 

 botanists, who probably never saw them, nor anything else, 

 in Shakspeare or Milton in their lives, till even in reading 

 them w r here they rightly come, you can scarcely recover their 

 fresh meaning : but none of the botanists ever think of asking 

 why Perdita calls the violet ' dim,' and Milton 'glowing.' 



Perdita, indeed, calls it dim, at that moment, in thinking 

 of her own love, and the hidden passion of it, unspeakable ; 

 nor is Milton without some purpose of using it as an emblem 

 of love,, mourning, but, in both cases, the subdued and 

 quiet hue of the flower as an actual tint of colour, and the 

 strange force and life of it as a part of light, are felt to their 

 uttermost. 



And observe, also, that both of the poets contrast the violet, 

 in its softness, with the intense marking of the pansy. Mil- 

 ton makes the opposition directly 



" the pansy, freaked with jet, 

 The glowing violet." 



Shakspeare shows yet stronger sense of the difference, in the 

 v " purple with Love's wound " of the pansy, while the violet is 

 sweet with Love's hidden life, and sweeter than the lids of 

 Juno's eyes. 



Whereupon, we may perhaps consider with ourselves a little, 

 what the difference is between a violet and a pansy ? 



13. Is, I say, and was, and is to come, in spite of florists, 

 who try to make pansies round, instead of pentagonal ; and 





