Primrose. 
(YOUTH.) 
“ The primrose I will pu’, the firstling of the year.” 
Burns. 
T HE Primrose , emblematical of youth, has received innu¬ 
merable deservedly warm encomiums from our poets, 
but none sweeter than those popular lines of Robert Herrick: 
“ Ask me why I send you here “ Ask me why this flower doth show 
This firstling of the infant year; So yellow, green, and sickly too; 
Ask me why I send to you Ask me why the stalk is weak 
This primrose all bepearl’d with dew; And bending, yet it doth not break ; 
I stiaight will whisper in your ears, I must tell you, these discover 
The sweets of love are wash’d with What doubts and fears are in a lover, 
tears. 
This pretty lyric is only one out of many which go to prove 
that their quaint old bard was not altogether unacquainted 
with the natural language of flowers. Shakspeare, who was 
as conversant with this florigraphical system as he was with 
every other mode of exciting human interest, thus daintily 
introduces this delicate blossom into his pathetic drama of 
“ Cymbeline,” as typical of the youthful dead : 
“ With fairest flowers, 
Whilst Summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, 
I ’ll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack 
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose.” 
Again, in the “Winter’s Tale/’ the grand dramatist still 
more explicitly portrays his knowledge of its symbolic cha¬ 
racter : 
“ The pale primroses, 
That die unmarried ere they can behold 
Bright Phoebus in his strength.” 
Milton also styles this vernal bloom “the pale primrose.’’ It 
has already been seen described by Herrick as “ the firstling 
