The Botany of Shakespeare 231 



figure. But the picture presents the confusion of life, 

 checked by the onset of winter, and is curiously exact. 

 No botanist can read the line, 



"A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass," 



and not recognize the exact portrayal of the living vege- 

 table cell. The living protoplasm is a liquid prisoner, 

 sure enough, hemmed in by walls transparent. There 

 could be no more striking image. And when in herb and 

 tree, in every living plant, the summer's work is ended 

 and "hideous winter" falls, the new cells, summer's dis- 

 tillation left, do in all perennials actually survive, lest 

 of the effect of beauty, beauty be bereft. There is no 

 more marvelous picture in all the vegetal world than that 

 of a great tree with all its myriad cells, in summer so 

 filled with the rush of life 's activity and change that we 

 might hear its music, in autumn sinking to quiescence, 

 and the winter's silent chill where liquid prisoners sleep 

 pent in walls of glass. The poet, to be sure, knew noth- 

 ing about this ; he probably wondered, as we all must do, 

 at the winter-sleep of ^plants; but after all* his simiLe 

 turns out to be correct ; he simply prophesied better than 

 he knew. The only natural science which Shakespeare 

 knew was gardening if that may be called a science. 

 His Sonnets are supposed to have been written about 

 1590, and the first scientific glimpse of the real "prisoner 

 pent in walls of glass" came about 1670, through the 

 lenses of Nehemiah Grew, a Puritan physicist and bot- 

 anist. 



I am aware that it is said by some that in a study such 

 as this, we are apt to read much into the writings of our 



