182 LONICERA SEMPERVIRENS.—SCARLET HONEYSUCKLE. 
Nearly all our own poets, when they refer at all to the Wood- 
bine or Honeysuckle, keep this embowering character especially 
in view. Bryant, in the “Unknown Way,” asks of the strange 
path— 
Guest thou by nestling cottage ? 
Goest thou by stately hall, 2 
Where the broad elm drvops, a leafy dome, 
And woodbines flaunt on the wall?” 
and, in the “Evangeline” of Longfellow, we are told that— 
“ Firmly builded with rafters of oak, the house of the farmer 
Stood on.the side of a hill commanding the sea; and a shady 
Sycamore grew by the door, with a woodbine wreathing around it.” 
It must be confessed, however, that our poets have either had 
their imaginations influenced by European literature or by Euro- 
pean experiences, for our native species have not the rampant 
habit of the European, and most of the honeysuckles and wood- 
bines of American horticulture, which help us to make umbrageous 
bowers, come to us from China or Japan; and when we see the 
we have little but 
the name to connect them with the plants of which the poets 
’ 
woodbine on the American “nestling cottage, 
sing. But the names carry us back a long way into history. 
By the ancient Greeks and Romans, as we learn from Pliny, the 
Honeysuckie was known as the Ferzclymenon. Literally, this is 
“rolling or twining around,” and is equivalent to the modern 
Woodbine. Honeysuckle seems a puzzling word to modern in- 
vestigators. Dr. Prior says, in his “Popular Names of British 
Plants,” that the name probably belonged to some other plant, 
and was “transferred to the woodbine on account of the honey- 
dew so plentifully deposited on its leaves.” But the account 
given by Green, the old English herbalist, seems to offer a better 
reason, He says: “In the evenings some species of sphinges, or 
hawk-moths, are frequently observed to hover over the blossoms, 
and with their long tongues to extract the honey from the very 
bottom of the flowers, A considerable quantity of the nectareous 
juice may sometimes be discerned in the tube. Insects that are 
