THE ARROW-LEAVED VIOLET. 



Beautiful are you in your lowliness; 



Bright in your hues, delicious in your scent, 



Lovely your modest blossoms, downward bent, 



As shrinking from our gaze, yet prompt to bless 



The passer-by with fragrance, and express 



How gracefully, though mutely eloquent. 



Are unobtrusive worth and meek content, 



Rejoicing in their own obscure recess. 



Delightful flowerets! at the voice of spring 



Your buds unfolded to its sunbeams bright; 



And though your blossoms soon shall fade from sight. 



Above your lowly birthplace birds shall sing. 



And from your clustering leaves the glow-worm fling 



The emerald glory of his earth-born light. 



Barton. 



Though the delicate blue has so long been recognized as the 

 characteristic color of these flowers, — 



" Blue, blue as if the sky let fall 

 A flower from its cerulean wall " — 



that it has even given the name to the most refrangible ray of 

 the solar spectrum, the extreme blue or violet light ; yet the 

 tradition runs that the flower was originally white, as several 

 species of it are now. Indeed, our only native violet which has 

 any noticeable fragrance, is a white one. 



Shakespeare has preserved to us a form of the legend which 

 tells how this white flower came to be purple as it is, in the 

 well-known lines from " Midsummer Night's Dream," the last of 

 which only shall we be able to make room for here. 



It seems that Cupid once had hostile intentions towards 



" A fair vestal throned by the West," — 



