THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 161 



Sinks to the heart — recalling, with a sigh, 

 Dim recollected feelings of the days 

 Of youth, and early love." 



Keats, with his marvellous felicity of diction, says : — 



" A filbert hedge with wild briar overtwined 

 And clumps of woodbine, taking the soft wind 

 Upon their summer thrones." 



And yet another, exercising a little poetic licence : — 



" With clasping tendrils it invests the branch 

 Else unadorned, with many a gay festoon 

 And fragrant chaplet ; recompensing well 

 The strength it borrows with the grace it lends." 



It seems to have been one of the favourite flowers of Shakspeare, in a 

 most familiar passage : — 



" I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 

 Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows ; 

 Quite o'er-canopied with luscious woodbine, 

 With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine." 



and again — 



" And bid her steal into the pleached bower, 

 Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, 

 Forbid the sun to enter." 



Milton, in " L' Allegro," is understood to refer to the woodbine under 

 the name of eglantine, a name usually conferred on the sweetbriar — 



" Through the sweetbrier, or the vine, 

 Or the twisted eglantine," 



which happily describes the twining habit of the honeysuckle. He 

 rather disparages it in " Comus " : — 



" I sat me down to watch upon a bank 

 With ivy canopied, and interwove 

 With flaunting honeysuckle : " 



but he makes up for it in " Lycidas," where although not a funeral 

 plant, he classes it with 



" The glowing violet, 

 The musk rose, and the well attired woodbine." 



Burns, with his wealth of rural imagery fairly revels in his descrip- 

 tions of the woodbine : — 



" The woodbine I will pu\ 



When the evening star is near, 

 And the diamond draps o' dew 

 Shall be her e'en sae clear.'' 



